Shattered

Mystery and horror genre writer Jay Bonansinga is best known for his novelizations of the Walking Dead comic books, the same material that has also been turned into a popular TV series. However, he has also written other work, including a series of detective fiction centered on a mixed-race African-American FBI profiler. The third novel from this series is Shattered, published in 2007.

The protagonist is the extraordinary Ulysses Grove, a man whose distinctive appearance is key to understanding his personality. Bonansinga described Grove in an interview as based on a real officer that the author met at Quantico, the US Marine Base. Grove deflects the natural assumptions of those around him by making the most of his handsomeness, being a dapper and flawless dresser: “He wears only high-end suits. These suits are his armor.” Not only does Grove look the part, but he acts it as well: he is laconic, tough, enormously brilliant, and difficult, like a cross between, in the author’s words, a “Homeric hero and Superfly… he was all that I wished to be.”

Nevertheless, Grove isn’t simply a human paragon. Instead, as we see hinted at throughout the novels, his ability to put himself into the minds of the serial killers he specializes in catching comes from a connection to the supernatural. Born in Kenya to a powerful shaman mother, Grove has some psychic abilities that he relies on in secret. Not even Maura suspects that Grove experiences visions that guide him to the right place at the right time.



When the novel opens, Grove is living with his journalist wife, Maura, and their infant son, Aaron, in a peaceful neighborhood in northern Virginia. They are still recovering from the case that brought them together in the previous novel, Twisted, when a serial killer terrorized New Orleans and murdered one of Grove’s dear friends.

However, this respite is interrupted when Grove receives his latest assignment: he has to track down a new serial killer who has a grisly method of killing his victims. The killer has been nicknamed the Mississippi Ripper because what he does reminds people of the ritualistic killings of Jack the Ripper in London in the nineteenth century. This ripper, however, doesn’t target prostitutes. Instead, he kills people in pairs, then removes their major organs, setting their corpses up to look at each other in mirrored poses.

Grove prepares to use his normal technique, summoning up his psychic powers to figure out this killer’s twisted logic and the method behind his madness. However, just as the profiler seems to be closing in on the murderer through visions that clarify what is going on, the novel reveals a twist: the killer is also psychic. By connecting to his mind through his powers, Grove has attracted the madman’s attention.



The killer turns his sights on Grove’s own family – Maura and baby Aaron become his next pair of disemboweling targets. To get to them, the killer enters a maximum-security prison in order to set in motion a diabolical series of events – a complex Rube Goldberg plot that the killer assumes will lead to the inevitable deaths of the Groves.

Terrified for their safety, Grove presses into his powers anew, digging into his past and into the true nature of his mother’s abilities to enhance his visions. Of course, in the end, Grove protects his family, circumventing the killer’s schemes.

The novel disappointed readers, with many complaining that the blend of forensic science and police work on the one hand, and supernatural premonitions on the other, just didn’t work, especially since it never clarified the killer’s actual motive or actions. Other critics point out that although Grove is a visually appealing character, there isn’t much development of his personality or that of anyone else in the novel – instead, they all feel like “cardboard cutouts.” Finally, many readers point to a litany of continuity errors, not least of which is the fact that Aaron is introduced as a six-month-old only to suddenly be one year old a few weeks later in the plot.