Danielle Girard"s first novel, Savage Art, is a thriller with a Jeffery Deaveresque twist. Casey McKinley was one of the FBI"s most prolific criminal profilers, until she herself fell victim to a serial killer nicknamed Leonardo da Vinci for his horrifically precise scalpel work on still-living victims. Casey survived the attack, deeply shocked and permanently disabled. Two years later, she is a broken woman, having lost her family, her work, and all but the most primitive use of her hands. Casey"s problems have only just begun. Leonardo is obsessed with her and intent upon finishing his job. But he has a roundabout way of proceeding: he selectively murders little girls, ages 5 or 6, whose mothers look just like Casey. This key bit of information is deduced by San Francisco Police Detective Jordan Gray, who, like Casey, is obsessively devoted to catching the killer. Even as Casey and Jordan make steady progress in locating Leonardo, his pace increases rapidly, and Casey is in greater peril as those closest to her become the killer"s targets. Savage Art is a by-the-numbers thriller that delivers all the necessary pieces but little more. Girard explores Casey"s psychology in the first half of the book, before the plot demands full narrative attention, and these moments distinguish the novel from others of its kind. Leonardo and Jordan, by contrast, lack anything that would mark them as different from the prototypical monstrous killer and righteous cop. The occasional logical error mars the plot--Casey should know the difference, for example, between a local power outage that blacks out traffic signals and an outage that the killer has rigged to her apartment. These aside, however, Savage Art ratchets up the fear quotient very effectively to keep readers glued to the book through the last page. --Kathi Inman Berens