The writing is easy and keeps you reading at a fast pace, appropriate to the storyline. It's a very quick read which often had me holding my breath for a few pages and breathing shallow while I tried to read faster. The characters aren't the focus, they seem to be legs upon which the tension is built. And this writer is good at building and maintaining suspense. Their are a couple love scenes which are quite steamy but justifiable due to the pressure cooker the characters are living in. If you like steamy sex scenes, there's a few good chapters in here and I found myself wondering if maybe Ms. Lowell has written a bodice ripper romance in her past.

As to the characters: the main character is well flushed out and it's easy and engaging to see the world through her eyes. Even with her amnesia of the events of the night on which the story is based, the author writes her in a way that you feel you know and understand her, and you can respect and admire her. The male lead is not as well developed but still a solid character; likeable, dependable and smart. The supporting cast only seemed to get enough detail to keep them from being card board cut outs pasted around the set, but since the main plotline is strong and written with a compelling readable style that goes very quickly, I didn't find that as disappointing.

I was a bit disappointed with the killer, while we see many chapters from his perspective and the author suceeds at keeping him hidden from us until very near the end, I would have liked to have more than what felt like an FBI basic profile sketch. Since we're inside his head many times, I was disappointed that somehow he still seemed to remain two dimensional and the sum up of his character at the end is perfunctory and not satisfying. A man does not become a maniacal, obsessive serial killer cause he had a rich father and one teenage crush laughed at him when he asked for a date.

Overall this was a very satisfying, distracting weekend read. I read this over a very cold winter couple of days and found myself looking forward to a cup of hot tea and snuggling up in my favorite reading chair to read this. It managed to make me forget the blowing snow and sub zero wind chills outside the window and draw me into a steamy summer in Washington DC and a heroine who can't remember the face of a man determined to kill her.