Rating: 3/5
Review:Well written, but...
The quality of the writing and the fresh approach to the story's structure meant that I enjoyed the first two-thirds of this book in spite of myself. It is the story of a detective in pursuit of a serial killer, narrated in short chapters cutting between the voices of the detective, the killer and the victims (who are dead by the time they are speaking to us). Against my expectations, I liked this and found the character sketches of the victims in particular very convincing.
However, at bottom the story is yet another in the sea of books, films and TV shows about killers performing monstrous acts of vicious brutality on women for his (and our) gratification and doesn't add anything to a now hackneyed and implausible genre. There is a serial killer preying on women in inventively sadistic ways, making a show of the bodies and sending notes with clues to the police. The killer plays psychological games and targets the detective himself. There is a detective to whom vital clues appear in dreams and who has a complex psychological back-story. He is insomniac and drinks excessively. Reality and fantasy become blurred. The emotional delirium becomes ever more intense...and so on and so on. Eventually, in spite of a couple of twists which I didn't see coming, this all got so tiresome and familiar that I got extremely fed up with it and the final revelation of the killer's motives seemed simply ludicrous to me.
It's a shame because Will Carver is obviously a talented writer, and I did keep reading to the end to find out what happened, but overall I found this unsatisfying and unmemorable and can only give it three stars.
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