Blood Rites — Barry Nazarian

Aiding in the search for a missing coed gradually leads Michael Marsten, her teacher and advisor, to the unsettling discovery that there may be other young women from other schools who had already met similar related fates. And then as his pursuit of the most unlikely perpetrator he could have imagined becomes increasingly more intense and personal, the involuntary investigator confronts the greatest revelation of them all. Namely that the person he suspects of being responsible for the disappearance of one young woman after another might himself have been the most tragic victim of them all. So that by the time it has reached its unforeseen conclusion, "Blood Rites" has become a mystery without a detective, involving a criminal whose desperate actions owe their motivation to a unique and startling form of innocence all its own.