A criminal law student is assisting his profiler professor in a study of serial killers when a local murder spree ramps up and threatens to unearth long-buried memories of his late brother, who was himself a notorious killer.

SYNOPSIS:

There’s an eagle tattooed on Gordon Taymor’s right bicep and a butterfly on his left.

In school to become a prosecutor, he gets swept up in the investigation of a wave of grisly local murders and joins his professor Bennett Toliver in a prison study of killers in which they try to emotionally “break” the subjects by confronting them with chilling images of their victims’ fates. But at the same time Gordon’s heart is hamstrung by buried memories of his own serial killer brother, and he’s falling in love with his study-mate, liberal fellow student Emily Pearce.

This pressure cooker explodes when one of the killers steals a gun and takes Emily hostage.

To save her Gordon distracts her abductor with a game of one-upmanship using the encyclopedic knowledge of serial killer trivia he shares with the prisoner—which ends up forcing Gordon to confess his own family story and builds to a startling emotional connection between the law-and-order wannabe and a “broken” killer.

Ending that crisis is only the beginning of Gordon’s involvement, though, as he then gets more personally invested in tracking and uncovering the real-time local killer—at the risk of losing his life, his sanity, and the girl he loves.

NICHOLL Top 20 percent (out of more than 7,000 scripts) AUSTIN SECOND-ROUNDER (Top 20 Percent out of almost 9,000), BLUECAT SEMIFINALIST (Top 200 out of more than 4,000): “A taut and frightening

psychological thriller with disturbing content and memorable characters.” “Definitely in the vein of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and SE7EN. The final twist is very clever and pays off in a way that makes you want to go back to the beginning and see if it was set up (it was).” “In obsession, love, and catharsis, Gordon is a compelling and sympathetic protagonist. An effective and disturbing psychological thriller by any standard, MY BROTHER’S KILLER makes a strong impression for the persona human interest and family elements it brings to the table.”