alan brents

The Killer Wore Tights, by Alan Brents

A warm December day in Orlando, with bright sunshine, blue skies, and gentle breezes. Holiday decorations already up around the city. To Detective Matt Fleming, second-in-command of the Orlando Police Department homicide unit, the cheerful weather and decorations seem to be mocking the horror of his crime scene--a beautiful and scantily dressed young woman found dead in a fast food restaurant dumpster.

The day doesn't get better when Matt is pulled off that crime and called to the scene of a double homicide--a prominent local judge and his chemistry professor lover found tied naked to beds, brutally tortured, and murdered in the Judge's home in a historic downtown Orlando neighborhood. To add to the horror, the judge and professor had become engaged only hours before their brutal murders.

With both the judge and the professor having money, there's no shortage of suspects. The judge's or the professor's children, to speed up their inheritance; envious professors in the professor's department; every criminal the Judge sentenced to jail; and every party to a lawsuit the Judge ever ruled against.

Not to mention that the torture, the strange symbols left painted on the walls at the Judge's house and carved into the bodies of the victims, and the skill with which the killer avoided leaving DNA or footprints suggest an experienced serial killer. Or was all that done to hide the identity of someone killing for a more prosaic motive such as money?

To top it all off, Matt is recovering from his grief over the loss of his fiancee in an automobile accident, and finds himself once again interested in women. But he's in the biggest case of his career, and his Lieutenant has told him that solving the case is crucial to Matt's future career.

Things get really hectic when the police discover a connection between the double murder and the murder of the young woman found in the dumpster. Can they solve the murders before the killer--or killers--strike again?