Dave Creegan: Touching Evil

Dave Creegan is a detective with the Organized and Serial Crimes unit, an elite police force based in London but with national jurisdiction, the British equivalent of the FBI. He was married once, but no longer -- except perhaps to his job. And even that relationship is pretty dodgy, because Creegan can be as driven and unpredictable as the criminals he tracks.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Creegan has confronted the policeman's darkest fear: being killed in the line of duty. In his days as a city copper, a routine drug bust went horribly wrong and Creegan wound up with a bullet in his head. By all rights, he should have died. Miraculously, he survived, with a scar on his forehead to match the deeper one inside, the mark of a man who has gazed into the pit of his own mortality. Far from cowing him into a desk job, though, the trauma has made him more reckless than ever. Perhaps, having escaped death once, he's convinced himself he's invincible. Or maybe he's overcompensating for the gnawing sense of dread in his gut that might paralyze a lesser man. More likely, it's a bit of both.

Either way, his ferocity makes him very good at his job, along with the skill for which he was recruited to the OSC: his uncanny knack for getting inside a killer's head. That's a frightening place to be, and Creegan has paid the emotional price for wallowing in the muck of the criminal psyche: a broken marriage and a chronic inability to let his guard down with anyone. He does find some consolation in the company of his two young daughters, but his ex-wife accuses him of using them as a form of sanctuary, salve on his psychological wounds. She's probably right.

It's not easy being Dave Creegan. It's even harder being the killers he pursues, when the man on their heels can look into the blackest depths of their souls without flinching -- because he sees a bit of himself there.

The preceding is an excerpt taken from the book,
MYSTERY!: A Celebration, by Ron Miller
(published by KQED Books).
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