Reviewed: “Mortal Fear” by Greg Iles

I have found four different books by Greg Iles tucked in different corners of my mother’s bookshelves and boxes of books. She apparently bought them because she bought things that Stephen King endorsed. I’m not sure if she liked the Iles books but I do. Very much.

Spandau Phoenix, Black Cross, and now Mortal Fear have all kept me from doing other productive things while I didn’t want to do anything but read them. I still have one more to read, in case you thought the count was off, then I’ll probably buy some more of his books.

But this is a book review about Mortal Fear so let’s get on with that, shall we?

Harper Cole is some sort of investment trader (I don’t know anything about trading and investments, so I’m vague there.) by day and, pretty much, an internet sex… something or another by night. Harper, in case you’re confused by the unisex name, is a man who is married to an obstetrician named Drewe. This whole internet sex thing seems very primitive and quirky, reading it in 2013, because the book was written in 1997.  Once you get used to that, however, the story gets very interesting.

You see, it costs a lot of money to be part of EROS, the company Harper works for (as a manager and chatter, for lack of a better word) so when some of the rich women signed up to get… aroused and satisfied by chat conversations on the site starting turning up dead, Harper gets dragged into the FBI and local police investigations of the murders. You’d think it’d be as simple as that.

But it’s not.

Harper’s got skeletons in the closet that you both have to see to believe and you will really want to see to believe. He ends up far more involved in a web of murder in the name of science than he could ever have imagined because of said skeletons.

What should have been a simple, if there is such a thing, investigation into crimes that today’s television dramas can only dream of spinning into good stories ends up involving every aspect of Harper’s life. He is, at the same time, both despicable and heroic.

He’s real.

And you want to read his story.

The sex stuff? Yeah, that’s pretty creepy and yet fascinating too.

P.S. Aside from the four books I mentioned, what other Greg Iles books should I read?