Denise Washington had been stabbed 22 times in the chest. Carl Peterson sat at his desk in the detective room of the Kankakee Police Station staring at the file and listening to the old Bendix clock. Tick and fucking tock. Tonight it said. “You have no life-You have no life”. And he didn’t. An ex-alcoholic who’d been dumped by the one woman he wanted to marry, Carl was stuck in a low paying job where he had probably already blown any chance for advancement. The Denise Washington file had been dumped on his desk two hours ago by Captain Frailey. “Shouldn’t take too long,” Frailey had said which meant the case was what the detectives called “a three call and dump”. One call to inform the family, another to pull up arrest records and the third to the coroner. The dump part meant just that – if no leads had surfaced in the three calls, dump the file into the unsolved cases cabinet and forget it. This is how the deaths of low-lifes were handled in Kankakee, Illinois. And Denise Washington was a low-life. This is how police departments coped with budget cuts and this is how policemen coped with being overworked – at least this is how it was done in a middle sized town firmly in the shadow of the great city of Chicago only fifty miles to the North. Carl had done his three calls. Actually, since Denise had been found with no ID and had been identified through dental records, Carl didn’t have to talk to the coroner because he already had an extensive report and the records had already been pulled. So really, this was a “one call and dump”, but Carl was having difficulty making the call to the family. He decided he’d tell them in person and was about to grab his coat when he got a sick feeling in his stomach that he might be opening a can of worms.

As more bodies were found and his investigation continued, to say that Carl was in over his head would’ve been the understatement of the year. His first mistake was thinking he was looking for a serial killer when in fact he was looking for people who were very adept at creating them. When Carl’s claustrophobic computer statistician girl friend, Laurie, kept finding ways of proving that coincidences weren’t coincidences at all and that murders in four different states were somehow connected, Carl was able to attract the interest of FBI pro-filer Bob Rathburn. When he and Rathburn track down and kill their man, Carl felt a sense of accomplishment he hadn’t felt at work in years. But then the murders continued. If it wasn’t for Laurie’s computer skills he never would’ve known that the same kinds of killings were now going on in Florida and Baltimore. It is then the unthinkable begins to make sense. Somehow, several different serial killers were connected. Loosely based on a real case, The Kill Switch reveals an ancient secret society which advocates murder as a solution to modern social problems. It’s too bizarre to be real until you realize that it might actually be the truth.