"Hotwire" by Alex Kava

Special Agent Maggie O'Dell still feels like she is being punished by her boss Ray Kunze when she is sent to Nebraska to investigate some mysterious animal slayings. However, she and local detectives come across a group of teenagers, a few dead, others seriously injured, by what they claim seemed like a wild animal with red eyes, although Maggie suspects a taser was involved.

Meanwhile, Maggie's potential boyfriend Col. Benjamin Platt is dragged into an investigation by Roger Bix, a chief at CDC (Centre for Disease Control) regarding schools experiencing severe outbreaks of food poisoning. They are able to track this to a national school lunch program organised by the US Department of Agriculture, who have purchased millions of chicken carcasses as the basis for those school lunches.

But what does this have to do with Maggie's case?

To be honest, I'm not really sure. It's possible that the victimised teenagers stumbled across an illicit chicken lab used to provide said chicken carcasses to the USDA, but it's never explicitly clear. In fact, NOTHING is explicitly clear in this frustratingly sparse thriller from Kava. Maggie is caught up in a government conspiracy yet AGAIN, when she's supposed to be a bloody serial killer profiler for the FBI. There is absolutely zero suspense for the majority of this tale, and Kava can't even be bothered to spend even ONE BLOODY CHAPTER on explaining what exactly the f*** has gone on in this stupid novel.

I'm actually embarrassed that I failed to fully grasp what was going on in a brief, empty thriller such as this. Despite the tenuous link I mentioned above, the novel says that the surviving teenagers - who themselves start getting knocked off - were the victim of a member of their group upset by the fact they were all moving on with their lives and leaving her behind. But how exactly did this girl orchestrate a fatal car accident whilst she was still bed-ridden in hospital? And if she was the one knocking them off, what was with all the tasering that killed some of them in the first place? Either they were being knocked off by someone who didn't want them to know the truth about their illicit activities, or they were knocked off by a psycho schoolmate. Which one? Kava doesn't seem to know. Then again, she doesn't even bother to tell us half of their names, so what does it really matter.

Another question: why am I still reading garbage by this incompetent author? She's awful. She couldn't write an exciting, competent thriller if her life depended on it and I'm tired of wasting money on the shallow rubbish she keeps putting out.