There's a lot going on in Brian Freemantle's latest, which looks like the start of a promising series about Claudine Carter, an Anglo-French forensic psychologist and criminal profiler. Carter works for Europol, a new agency based on the FBI that actually exists (as the author tells us), but not in the size or strength projected here. A large part of the story concerns the infighting and backstabbing between the various countries involved in the fledgling agency. Dr. Carter is a beautiful woman whose British husband hanged himself five months before, and who now faces a frightening investigation into her personal life just as her biggest professional challenge--a series of gruesome murders and dismemberments, spelled out in full detail--is underway. Add to that an ambitious French boss, Henri Sanglier, who fears that Carter's late father (a failed Interpol agent) found out something damning about Sanglier's Resistance hero father; the fact that Dr. Carter's French restaurateur mother is very ill; a possible romance between Claudine and an Italian pathologist with secrets of his own; and an ongoing threat to a famous American profiler from a killer he once helped convict and you have a full plate indeed. But all of the ingredients are colorful, and, as usual, Freemantle (who also writes the Charlie Muffin series) serves them up with style and energy. --Dick Adler