The fourth in the acclaimed series of 'Daniel Rinaldi' thrillers, Phantom Limb will have readers guessing and gasping for breath until the very last page.
Psychologist and police consultant Daniel Rinaldi's new patient a former Hollywood starlet now married to a ruthless business tycoon is kidnapped right outside his office. Through a bizarre sequence of events, he's forced to deliver the ransom demand himself, drawing him into a deadly catandmouse game with a brilliant, lethal adversary. Complicating things is the victim's own family, whose members have dark secrets of their own and whose loyalties are suspect.
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Review
Dennis Palumbo's latest, Phantom Limb, keeps his adrenaline-soaked Daniel Rinaldi series going at full blast as the Pittsburgh cop/psychologist gets tangled up in a complex case of kidnapping, murder, sexual deviance, and so much more. Fueled and lent gravitas by his tempered idealism and no-nonsense professionalism, Rinaldi is a joy to follow as he leads us on a top-notch, original and harrowing high-wire act of the first order. (John Lescroart, New York Times best selling author of The Keeper)
Phantom Limb is another of Dennis Palumbo's remarkable tales set in our native Pittsburgh as told through the eyes of iconoclastic police psychologist Daniel Rinaldi. This time it's monied old Pittsburgh society meets Hollywood glitz in a page-turner that has you racing to the end. (Jeffrey Siger, author of the Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis series)
Dennis Palumbo's Daniel Rinaldi books are cerebral thrillers of the first order, with twisting plots, terrifying villains, and a narrative driven by the insight and compassion of the psychologist at the center of it all. If I ever find myself trapped inside a thriller, I hope Daniel Rinaldi can find some time in his schedule. (Timothy Hallinan, author of the Junior Bender mysteries and the Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers)
At the start of Palumbo's twisty fourth Daniel Rinaldi mystery (after 2013's Night Terrors), the psychologist, who consults for the Pittsburgh PD, receives a visitor one afternoon he last saw posing in Playboy almost 30 years earlier. Lisa Campbell, ex-starlet and current trophy wife to elderly, wheelchair-bound tycoon Charles Harland, plans to kill herself at 7 o'clock that evening. Daniel has only 50 minutes to talk her out of it. Soon after Lisa leaves his office, the police inform him that she's been kidnapped. As a doctor who may have heard critical information that he's ethically bound by confidentiality not to share, Daniel is in tricky position as he seeks to help the Harland family and the police get Lisa back. He serves as the perfect point of view character, central to the action without needing to clamor for attention. Daniel's personal story continues to evolve in this satisfying entry, which ends on a cliffhanger. (Publishers Weekly)
Dennis Palumbo's terrific, exciting, fascinating Daniel Rinaldi novels just get better and better! His latest, Phantom Limb, is a nonstop blast, with moments as gut-wrenching for the reader as they are for Dr. Rinaldi and his fellow players. (Thomas B Sawyer, best-selling author of Cross Purposes and No Place to Run)
Amputees say a missing arm or leg can itch and demand to be scratched, as though it were still there. That's a "phantom limb," and its ghostly presence is one of the keys to this lively novel. The premise is conventional enough: a has-been film star, married to a gazillionaire coot, is kidnapped. The stock characters are present: the old boy's bitter, boozy son; officious police and feds; a woman cop who chafes at not being taken seriously; and even the hero, the penetratingly analytical psychologist Daniel Rinaldi. A minor figure, who lost a leg in Afghanistan, waits in the wings as the plot races to its conclusion. But after the kidnap drama ends, there are about 170 pages to go. What follows is a reexamination of the evidence, when the phantom limb makes its nonpresence known. Could it be that the kidnap-ransom plot was really about something else? We're on the psychologist's turf now, and the revelations are more interesting than the author's attempt to turn this into an actioner. It's about fragmented people's attempts to be whole. (Booklist)
In "Phantom Limb," Dennis Palumbo has given us another fast-paced, suspenseful case in the career of Dr. Daniel Rinaldi. This time Rinaldi is up against an array of antagonists who will make your skin crawl, and it's a pleasure to see him back. (Thomas Perry, Edgar-Award-winning author of the Jane Whitefield series)

About the Author
Dennis Palumbo, a former Hollywood screenwriter, is a psychotherapist in private practice, as well as an author. He is the author of a mystery collection, From Crime to Crime, as well as the 'Daniel Rinaldi' mystery novels, and his short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and the Strand, among others.