YOU WILL KNOW ME BY MY DEEDS

An Atlanta newspaper reporter tracks child murders while a mysterious figure stalks his wife in Cobb’s thriller, one in a series.

At the tail end of 1981, Billy Tarwater gets disquieting news: his wife Cynthia reports noticing a car following her while she was driving with the couple’s two young kids. They worry this potential stalker may have links to Cynthia’s abduction 18 years earlier, when the then-teen girl narrowly escaped a killer’s clutches. Billy helped stop said culprit, but what if there was an accomplice? Meanwhile, Billy is covering the trial of a man charged with killing two adults. Authorities also want to prosecute the defendant for a series of child kidnappings and murders that began in 1979 and ended only recently. However, Billy and his source, a police informant, believe they can tie someone with connections to the Ku Klux Klan to at least some of the young victims, and they work to compile evidence. This stirs up a host of dangerous people who ultimately become threats to Billy and his family. Cobb’s novel, which picks up immediately after the action of The Devil You Knew (2022), deftly fuses history with fiction. Billy dives deep into the ongoing murder trial and the 1979-81 Atlanta child murders, both of which were real events. Quite a few characters return from the previous novel; some showcase newfound friendships, and some prove to be outright diabolical. The largely dubious cast amps up the suspense like the “bright orange end of a cigarette glow[ing] in the dark” when a stalker is, perhaps, on the loose. While the novel’s present-day action unfolds over a couple of months, the author skillfully and coherently jumps around the timeline, from Billy’s frequent meet-ups with the informant throughout 1981 to decades in the past.

A bracing historical thriller that further enriches this top-notch series.