A+ #BookReview: Head Cases by John McMahon

Head Cases (PAR Unit, #1) by John McMahon
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: PAR Unit #1
Pages: 341
Published by Minotaur Books on January 28, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Head Cases follows an enigmatic group of FBI agents as they hunt down a murderer seeking his own justice in this electrifying—and commercial—series debut.
FBI Agent Gardner Camden is an analytical genius with an affinity for puzzles. He also has a blind spot on the human side of investigations, a blindness that sometimes even includes people in his own life, like his beloved seven-year-old daughter Camila. Gardner and his squad of brilliant yet quirky agents make up the Patterns and Recognition (PAR) unit, the FBI’s hidden edge, brought in for cases that no one else can solve.
When DNA links a murder victim to a serial killer long presumed dead, the team springs into action. A second victim establishes a pattern, and the murderer begins leaving a trail of clues and riddles especially for Gardner. And while the PAR team is usually relegated to working cold cases from behind a desk, the investigation puts them on the road and into the public eye, following in the footsteps of a killer.
Along with Gardner, PAR consists of a mathematician, a weapons expert, a computer analyst, and their leader, a career agent. Each of them must use every skill they have to solve the riddle of the killer’s identity. But with the perpetrator somehow learning more and more about the team at PAR, can they protect themselves and their families…before it’s too late?
With an enigmatic case that will keep readers on the edge of their seats and a thoroughly engaging ensemble cast, John McMahon’s Head Cases is a triumph.

My Review:

FBI Agent Gardner Camden isn’t supposed to be out in the field investigating current cases. Gardner, and his whole team, the PAR Unit (Patterns and Recognition), are the team that stays in the office and investigates the rest of the FBI’s ‘white whales’, the cold cases that haven’t been solved by more accepted methods of investigation – or more acceptable agents – but still need resolution.

All the agents in PAR, every single one of them, have an eye for detail, an ability to put the oddest pieces together into the right puzzles – and/or have pissed off the powers that be in one way or another.

PAR is career Siberia, even if it’s located in sunny Jacksonville Florida.

PAR’s cases are supposed to be ice cold and only conducted among the files, but Gardner is out in the field again because one of his old, cold cases has turned suddenly and unexpectedly hot. A serial killer is dead. That’s not why the case is hot. The case is hot because that serial killer was declared dead years ago, in a case that Gardner closed himself – because the killer was dead.

Turns out he wasn’t. But he is NOW. Meaning that someone found a man the FBI hadn’t been able to find – and killed the one they let get away. The one that Gardner let get away.

Just as Gardner reopens THAT old case, another serial killer gets his just desserts halfway across the country. But this one hadn’t gotten away. He’d served his time, paid his debt to society, and was released to live out his remaining, declining, years. Whether he’d have killed again in his old age was certainly a possibility – but it hadn’t happened yet. It hadn’t even had time to happen.

Leaving PAR and its ensemble of misfit agents on the trail of a serial killer who kills serial killers, using not his own methods but the just desserts of killing each killer by using each killer’s own methods to make his point.

He’s also made the point that he’s on the inside, reading their files, following their tracks. Either he’s breached the FBI’s highly vaunted security – or he’s already inside it.

All PAR has to do is put together all those patterns and recognize not only whodunnit but why and how. What made THIS serial killer blow, and what they need to do to protect themselves and their loved ones even as the FBI threatens to pull the plug on their case and their careers to protect itself from an enemy within.

Escape Rating A+: I picked this up this week because the book I planned to read was really fluffy and it just wasn’t what I was in the mood for. What I wanted was something a bit darker and grittier, which led me right to the mystery/suspense/thriller section of the virtually towering TBR pile.

This is the book that reached out and grabbed me – and it was absolutely the right book at the right time.

I often have kind of a love/hate relationship with thrillers. I get caught up in the pacing, I love the chase, I adore that the characters who are doing the chasing are often very good at their jobs. In other words, they generally hit my kink for competence porn squarely on the nose.

The problem I have is that the motivation for the thriller is often something I don’t want in my head. Things I absolutely do recognize exist but that I don’t want to be fully immersed in. Things like domestic violence, stalking, and serial killers.

And yes, I know I just contradicted myself. But this is a story about serial killers told from the perspective of the police hunting them down. We’re never inside the killers’ heads – which is the place I don’t want to be AT ALL.

So the process of this one reads like a police procedural – just one where the clock is ticking very loudly because the perpetrator keeps on perpetrating at a fast clip and fully intends to keep right on doing it until he gets stopped by the investigators – who he is also targeting.

In that sense, Head Cases reminded me a lot of the Quinn & Costa and Forensic Instincts series, both series where highly competent teams chase down serial killers or other equally dangerous and deadly repeat criminals. Head Cases hit a thriller sweet spot that I got caught up in from the very first page and didn’t let me go until the righteous and cathartic end.

Gardner, in particular, also gave me vibes of Miranda Chase from her Miranda Chase NTSB series. Both characters see the world a bit differently due to neurodiversity, and both use their differences as strengths in their chosen fields. I’m very glad to have found another protagonist whose adventures and investigations are utterly absorbing – and I like both of their ‘Scooby gangs’ very much.

Head Cases turned out to be an edge-of-the seat compelling read for this somewhat thriller-adverse reader. I’m thrilled (yes, pun definitely intended) to say that there’s a second book in the series, Inside Man, coming out in January. I’m looking forward to seeing PAR tackle another case as well as, perhaps, getting stuck into the mess that the FBI has made of itself at the end of this book.

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