When Manhattan model and masseuse Julissa Brisman went to meet a client at a luxury Boston hotel, she thought she’d be leaving the hotel with enough money to buy her little sister’s school books. But Philip Markoff, the handsome, clean-cut, twenty-two-year-old med student who hired Brisman on Craigslist, had different plans. On April 14, 2009, guests notified management of a woman screaming on the twentieth floor, and Brisman was found in a pool of blood, with several bullet wounds to her torso and…plastic restraints around her wrist.

Hotel surveillance video captured Markoff’s image, and an additional tip helped police connect him to attacks on several other women, including a prostitute who was tied up at a Boston hotel, and the assault of an exotic dancer in Rhode Island, both of which bear a striking similarity to the Brisman murder.

A skillful blend of hard journalism and fascinating yet chilling true-crime narrative, this headline-making story will appeal to fans of Ann Rule.