Product Description

Two hot young lovers who also happen to be cold-blooded killers ...Lily deVries suffers from DID, a psychiatric condition known as dissociative identity disorder. Triggered by a devastating childhood trauma, her mind has fragmented into different personalities known as 'alters'. There's the gentle, childlike Lily; the sexually voracious Lilah; and Lilith - the violent psychopath. Now she's found herself in the Reed-Chase mental institution, where they're hoping to find a cure. But there's another patient undergoing treatment at the Institute. Fellow DID sufferer Ulysses Maxwell faces life imprisonment following the rape, torture and murder of over a dozen women. When Lilith and Max - Maxwell's psychopathic alter - meet one another, the reaction is dynamite. And when the unthinkable happens and they escape from the Institute, it's up to ex-FBI Agent Pender to track down a terrifying pair of killers who win hearts as easily as they slit throats.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #336919 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

About the Author
The author of the terrifying serial killer thrillers, THE GIRLS HE ADORED, FEAR ITSELF and 27 BONES, Jonathan Nasaw lives in Pacific Grove, California.

Customer Reviews

When She Was Bad - Jonathan Nasaw
This is the fourth in the EL Pender - retired FBI Agent - series. However, Pender has little more than a periphery role in the first half of the novel.

The story line is a good one with the 2 main characters Lily DeVries and Ulysses Maxwell suffering from multiple personality disorder originating from the most dreadful sexual crimes that they had been victim to as very young children by their own parents.

They meet each other in an upmarket mental institution and plan to escape. As the story line moves along, at a good pace, their varying alter egos emerge with devasting results and a high body count. There are some short explanations given via dialogue to explain the disorder both characters are experiencing but the psychological element is not taken far enough to produce a really good thriller.

The escape was clearly foreseen when the institute's director lives on the institute's grounds and routinely has Ulysses to visit himself and his family. The ending was also weak, I started to speed read and felt like it was a low budget film ending.

Brilliant Must Read Thriller
I love this author's work. It's a great gripping read as are his other books. Recommended highly for those that want to be scared to death as opposed to bored to death.

Difficult to put down once you start reading.

No-thrills thriller
In a scenario that stretches credibility more than a little, a one-legged young man and a young woman with similar multiple personality disorders are incarcerated in a maximum-security mental institution. Both have a history of extreme violence but specialists treating them - using methods that are not openly permissable - claim to have terminated their evil alter-egos such that only the nice, friendly ones remain.

Well, surprise surprise, the treatment didn't work and instead the 'patients' learn how to consciously hide their psychopathic identities and plan an escape. Most of this is revealed on the back cover so it's rather tedious to have to wait more than half the length of the story for it to actually happen - knowing about this in advance dampens down any element of suspense, it's really just a matter of passing the time while we wait for it to happen. It should, on the other hand, give the author more than enough time and space to draw and develop the leading players' characters out, but it doesn't really work out that way, in my opinion.

This was my first experience of a novel by Jonathan Nasaw, and I read it on the back of two other crime fiction novels which by coincidence had a number of geographical features common to this one. The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver is largely based in the California region of Monterey, and Heartsick by Chelsea Cain is based in Portland, Oregon. So it was kind of odd that When She Was Bad should be based in Portland and (in part) Monterey. That's where it ceases to be worth being compared, however, because as a crime thriller and even as a basic story it pales into insignificance against the Deaver and Cain novels. I understand that it is actually part of a series to feature retired FBI Agent E.L. Pender, if that's the case I'm surprised it has lasted as long as this because he is a pretty forgettable character, not worthy of mention in the same sentence as Connelly's Harry Bosch, even though I just did.

This is just fodder for a long journey, interesting at times and not that badly written but the attempts at humour in the narrative went down badly and overall I was just impatient to get it over and done with. I very much doubt that I would read a Nasaw novel again, there are many others out there that offer more rewarding experiences.