The Bottom Line:Â A hypnotic, moody and suspenseful serial killer thriller that pulls you into its darkness and refuses to let you get away.
Wings of Madness opens in a damp stone cellar on the outskirts of Pawtucket Falls, Massachusetts, where Michelle Townsend wakes to the terrifying realization that she is being held captive. It soon gets worse, as her abductor evidently takes pleasure in forcing his victims to run so he can hunt them down. Meanwhile, 23-year-old Sadie Hogan goes missing after last being seen with Taylor Franklin, a struggling musician whose once-promising career has devolved into 80s cover band gigs, substance-fueled lapses and unsettling blackouts.Â
Enter Gus Wheeler, the FBI profiler first introduced in R. John Dingle’s series debut Karma Never Sleeps. Wings of Madness finds Gus backstage after a jazz club gig in Boston. He’s just finished up a tour playing bass for jazz legend Wynton Marsalis when Jeff Cattagio, the head of the FBI’s Boston Office, approaches him. Jeff explains that three women are dead or missing. All of them were last seen in a downtown club area called Music Row. Â
Thrust back into the demands of a federal investigation, Wheeler and his partner Vanessa Lambert are drawn into the Pawtucket Falls murders. But the investigation goes through Taylor Franklin, whose claim that he doesn’t remember meeting one of the victims doesn’t sit well with Gus. Is Taylor a witness, a target or a suspect?
In his sophomore novel, Dingle delivers the convincing procedural scaffolding of a federal manhunt while layering his hero into someone who is far more than he appeared to be in book one. Like Daniel Silva’s longtime hero Gabriel Allon – both painter and Mossad operative – Gus Wheeler gains definition through artistry. His dual identity enriches Dingle’s narrative significantly. Just as Allon’s eye for brushstrokes sharpens his perception of intelligence work, Wheeler’s ear for tone and rhythm informs the precision with which he approaches an investigation. In Wings of Madness, the deconstruction of a bassline and the reconstruction of a crime scene are presented as parallel acts of discipline, each requiring patience, craft, and relentless attention to detail. Readers may also be reminded of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, a detective whose jazz sensibilities subtly shape his worldview.
The supporting cast amplifies Wheeler’s depth. Vanessa Lambert, with her sardonic wit and perceptive instincts, serves as both foil and partner, grounding Wheeler’s perfectionism in streetwise pragmatism. Dingle uses the characters orbiting Taylor Franklin – the aging bandmates, the sympathetic bartender, the grieving families of victims – to add texture to Pawtucket Falls, making it a setting as vivid as the New England towns of Dingle’s first novel.
With this second series entry, Dingle proves that Gus Wheeler is more than a one-case wonder: he is a series character with the range to carry investigations that are as psychologically incisive as they are suspenseful.
