This story was great! Very few suspense stories have the intended effect on me. Not that I don't enjoy them, but usually they're just a story. This one was so well written, and so well read that I was carried along by it, heart pounding, to the very end. If I'd been in a more rational frame of mind, I may have predicted the ending, but as it was I didn't see it coming at all. At the climax of the story I was urging him "pull the trigger! Now!" which made the ending that much more effective because I can totally understand where he was coming from.
I like the way it was written to give the details in such an order that a listener can relate to his motivations for doing what he did. If just told in straight up chronological, it would've gone something like "I came home. I learned the crazy lady escaped. I pulled out my gun and shot the first thing that moved." If it'd been told like that I wouldn't have been able to relate very well, but the way it was told I relived his terror every step of the way.
I liked that the psychotically violent villain was female--it seems like all the psycho crazies in stories I've read lately are all male.
The story played well with the concepts of associative memory, especially as related to scent, and with post-traumatic stress syndrome. In his eyes, the woman took on a seemingly invincible nature like a Michael Myers. It was, of course, completely his imagination, and she didn't even show up in the timeline of the story, but it's all the more powerful for her absence. The only way the suspense could be a little better is if he HADN'T been convicted. If he just moved again, and he knew that she was out there somewhere, looking for him, that would've been great. As it is, he ended up in prison. Prisons not only keep people in, they keep crazy weapon-wielding people out. So he probably could not possibly be safer--from her at least.
The one big coincidence was a little bit hard to swallow in afterthought, that his girlfriend would buy the new perfume on the same day that he learns of the escape. But the thing is, crazy coincidences happen in real life all the time, one crazy coincidence in a story doesn't bother me. For instance--the Interstate 35W bridge collapse that happened in Minnesota last year? I was about 8 minutes away from being crushed by that bridge. My company was having a party on a riverboat that cruised up and down the Mississippi through the Twin Cities. The company had never had that particular party venue, nor had I EVER been on the Mississippi on any sort of watercraft. The boat was going down the lock system through the cities, and was in the lock just upriver of the bridge. There was still one lock between us and the bridge, and that lock would've taken about 8 minutes to lower us down. If we'd left the dock eight minutes earlier we would've been smushed. As it was we were close enough to hear and see everything. That's what I would call a crazy coincidence--if it were in a fiction story, someone would no doubt cry out "Unbelievable coincidence!".
Good show! Episodes like this are the reason I stick around.