The Bride Collector by Ted Dekker

     Ted Dekker is a very prolific Christian writer who actually applies his religion to his writing, by which I mean that he has no sex and bad language in his books and there's usually some sort of positive or thoughtful reference to God in his stories as well. I have only read one other of his books (a good vs. bad fantasy) and I was interested to see what his other books were like.

     In The Bride Collector, FBI Special Agent Brad Raines must find and stop a serial killer who is killing beautiful women.

     Sounds pretty standard for your police procedural/suspense/mystery novel, eh? This one is a little different, though, in that Dekker blurs the line between sanity and insanity by making some of his most notable main characters residents of a home for the gifted mentally ill. He asks the question: do we not all have pockets of mental illness? And another: are those who think in different patterns from the "rest of us" really just gifted in ways society is not organized to appreciate? And another: can one ever be "healed" of mental illness, particularly when that illness stems from a traumatic experience? Interesting questions.

     I did wonder how squeaky clean Ted Dekker would approach a serial killer of women--usually there's something sexual going on there. But, he dodged that bullet very neatly and still made his killer perfectly frightening. It was an engaging book and I loved that the bad language and sex scenes were missing.