Nate Rodriguez is a police sketch artist for the NYPD, and his success rate is high, with one out of three of his drawings leading to an arrest. But when he is faced with an unusually talented killer, he realizes that he may have met his match. For this killer is a man very much like himself–a man who sees and thinks in pictures. A killer who leaves drawings at the crime scenes depicting his murders in chilling, gory–and prescient–detail. As Nate's portraits become more and more accurate images of the madman–the killer finds a way to steal Nate's portraits and then imitate Nate's own hand. The conflicting evidence leads the police to suspect that Nate himself could be the killer and pushes Nate into a frightening cat and mouse chase for his quarry. Life and death, art and artifice have never been so vividly bound together. Jonathan Santlofer pushes the boundaries of the thriller to new heights with this masterful blend of art and suspense. With sequential sketches that alternate throughout the text–first the killer's, then Nate's–Santlofer teases us with irresistible clues and psychological details delivered in a highly original way.

“Santlofer’s fluid, almost poetic, writing, coupled with his extraordinary artwork, places him at the forefront of cutting-edge crime fiction.” —Chicago Tribune Jonathan Santlofer has brilliantly reinvented the crime novel, and he returns with his most gripping and astonishing suspense novel to date: The Murder Notebook. An acclaimed visual artist whose numerous awards include two National Endowment for the Arts painting grants—and whose work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, and Artforum, among other publications—Santlofer combines gripping tales of murder and detection with stunning artwork that enhances and is integral to the story. In The Murder Notebook he brings back NYPD forensic sketch artist Nate Rodriguez, hero of Santlofer’s critically acclaimed thriller Anatomy of Fear, to unravel a gruesomely tangled thread of apparent murder-suicides in New York City.