Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

Former detective Dave Gurney is a man trying desperately to be in harmony with himself. Recently retired from the NYPD as their top man in homicide, he and his wife, Madeleine, have retired to an idyllic little town in upstate New York.

Try as he might, however, he just can’t completely detach himself from his deep-seated desire to solve puzzles and figure out what makes killers tick. And so it is a double-edged sword that lands in his lap when an old classmate, Mark Mellery, seeks him out for help with some mysterious, threatening letters he’s been receiving.

The letters are all in the form of poems that set forth a puzzle, the first of which also included a “game” – think of any number between 1 and 1000 and then open the small envelope included. Mellery was understandably freaked out when after picking 658, he thought at random, he opened the envelope to find written on the paper inside it… 658.

As the letters are thinly veiled threats against Mellery’s life, Gurney tries to convince him to take them to the police. Mellery refuses and makes Gurney promise that he will not either. When Mellery is brutally murdered in his home a few days later, however, Gurney has no choice but to take all the information he has to local law enforcement. When more people are killed, including a police officer, Gurney is reluctantly invited to join the investigation as a consultant. (more…)

In Maps of Hell, British crime writer Matt Wells initially has a bigger problem on his hands than nailing his enemies… he has to figure out who he is first.

The book opens with Matt regaining consciousness in a tiny cell, naked, beaten and unable to recall who he is or how he got there. He’s taken from his cell repeatedly for bizarre, Clockwork Orange-esque sessions aimed at conditioning his mind… but to what end? Matt doesn’t want to stick around long enough to find out.

Taking advantage of a lapse in one of the sessions he makes a daring escape, during which he realizes that he – and many others – are being held and experimented on by a fringe militia group at a compound deep in the forests of Maine. His memory slowly returns while he’s on the run trying desperately to stay one step ahead of his militia pursuers. And they aren’t the only ones looking for him.

A series of gruesome murders have been occurring in Washington, D.C., with Matt’s fingerprints turning up at one of the crime scenes. If that wasn’t bad enough, he’s also wanted for questioning in the disappearance of his girlfriend, British DCI Karen Oaten, who was in D.C. to meet with the Department of Justice.

Now, in addition to trying to stay one step ahead of the militia members tracking him, Matt also has to decide whether to go to the authorities and trust them to believe his story, or try on his own to solve the puzzle of his abduction, his girlfriend’s disappearance, and why he’s being framed for murder.

Maps of Hell is a truly frantic and engaging read. It is decidedly unnerving to be thrust into a world where the narrator, normally the reader’s guide, himself doesn’t know precisely what’s going on. And author Paul Johnston has captured Matt’s fear and confusion in a way that’s so vivid it’s almost palpable:

When I came round, I didn’t have a clue where I was. My head was ringing with strange sounds and I saw a blur of colors and shapes. Gradually my vision cleared, but my ears were still filled with discordant voices. There was a foul stench in my nostrils. I tried to move, but my arms and legs were confined. I looked down and saw that I had been tied to a wheelchair. I was wearing paper clothes again. I felt a twinge of alarm and glanced around. What I saw wasn’t reassuring.

Having read the previous two books in the Matt Wells series is not required in order to enjoy Maps of Hell. In fact, not having done so could arguably enhance the experience as the reader would truly be discovering everything for the first time right along with Matt as he struggles to understand who he is and what’s happening to him.

Author Paul Johnston consistently produces books that manage to take a familiar premise and completely turn it on its ear, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Maps of Hell. If you’ve not read anything by Johnston before, grab a copy of Maps of Hell and begin your journey into the mind of one of the most creative – and criminally under the radar – thriller writers working today.

Maps of Hell is available from Mira (ISBN: 978-0778327783).

At first glance John Wayne Cleaver seems like a normal fifteen-year-old midwestern teenager. He hangs out with his best friend, has an after school job, and is obsessed with his hobby.

Of course, he only hangs out with his “friend” – the one kid in school weirder than he is – to camouflage his complete lack of social skills, he works as an assistant mortician, and his hobby… well, it’s serial killers.

The reason Cleaver finds serial killers so interesting is because he believes it’s his fate to become one. That belief is reinforced when his therapist officially diagnoses him as a sociopath.

Naturally, Cleaver wants to learn as much about what makes his fellow sociopaths tick as possible. However, his point in learning about them is not to perfect his fated craft, but so that he can try to find a way to prevent himself from fulfilling his perceived destiny.

To that end Cleaver has established an elaborate set of rules he lives by in order to remove any potential temptation that may lure his inner demon – which he calls Mr. Monster – out from behind the mental wall Cleaver has constructed to contain it.

Things seem to be going well. Working in his family’s mortuary satisfies his curiosities and allows him to get hands-on with dead people, and the weekly visits with his therapist Dr. Neblin (wonderfully written interactions) give him someone he can speak with frankly about his internal struggles. But when horribly mutilated bodies start turning up indicating the presence of an honest-to-goodness serial killer right in his town, it’s all Cleaver can do to try and keep Mr. Monster under wraps while he attempts to track down the killer.

I Am Not A Serial Killer may be the most unique coming of age story ever written. For as much as it is a serial killer story, with a touch of supernatural horror, at its heart it is really a character study. Wells has done a masterful job taking the reader into the mind of a teenage sociopath struggling to come to terms with himself and his inner demon. The matter of fact manner in which Cleaver accepts his condition is at turns honorable, humorous, horrifying, and always, always fascinating.

One may be tempted to compare Cleaver to a teenage Dexter, but there is a crucial difference: where Dexter embraces his sociopathic urges, Cleaver wants desperately to defeat his. Fortunately there are two sequels to I Am Not A Serial Killer already in the works, so we’ll all get to see whether Cleaver is able to keep Mr. Monster harnessed… or whether he really is destined to be a serial killer.

- I Am Not A Serial Killer: Book Trailer -

Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb of Somerset, England lives his young life with more purpose than most ever experience in an entire lifetime.

His father long since out of the picture, his mother stuck in a dead end housekeeping job and his Nan (grandmother) still haunted by the disappearance of her son, Billy, eighteen years earlier, Steven and his five-year-old brother exist in a house perpetually filled with tension and despair.

Billy, who was the same age at the time he went missing as Steven is now, is presumed to have been killed by pedophile and serial killer Arnold Avery. Convicted of killing six children, though he never admitted to Billy’s abduction or murder, Avery is serving a life sentence in a nearby prison.

That Billy disappeared at such a young age was tragic enough, but Steven is convinced what has cast such a dark cloud over his family is that Billy’s body was never found. His Nan in particular seems unable to move on, holding a daily vigil at the window as if still expecting Billy to come home even after eighteen years.

Steven believes that if he could just find Billy’s body he would be able to heal his family’s psychological wounds. After all:

“If Nan loved him and Davey, maybe she and Mum would be nicer to each other; and if Nan and Mum were nicer to each other, they would all be happier, and be a normal family, and… well… just everything would be… better.”

Determined to find Billy’s body and bring it home to rest so that he can have a normal family, Steven spends all of his free time digging boy-sized holes in the moor where Avery’s known victims were found, to no avail. Frustrated by his lack of results, he finally has an epiphany: go straight to the source. And so Steven writes a letter to Avery that sets into motion a life-altering chain of events.

Though the cryptic exchanges between Steven and Avery are reminiscent of the Clarice Starling / Hannibal Lecter relationship in Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs, through her use of a child protagonist Bauer has crafted a fresh twist on the serial killer crime genre. She has, in fact, managed to seamlessly weave together a psychological suspense novel and a traditional coming-of-age story.

At only 220 pages Blacklands is a quick read, though given the compelling storyline it could have been twice as long and I still don’t think I’d have been able to put it down without finishing in one sitting. Absolutely heartbreaking in his earnestness, painfully realistic in the missteps that he makes, and inspiring in the depth of his determination, Steven Lamb is one of the most fully realized characters I’ve come across in quite some time. That he is merely a child makes what Bauer has accomplished with Blacklands, a debut offering no less, all the more impressive.

Killing people is The Oracle’s business, and business is good in author Shaun Jeffrey’s incredibly dark novel The Kult. The Oracle, you see, doesn’t just kill people; he tortures and mutilates them in horrifying ways, turning them, in his mind, into macabre works of art. Then he takes photographs of his creations, which he sends to the police.

Detective Chief Inspector Prosper Snow is in charge of The Oracle investigation. He’s also a member of the Kult, a small group of friends he’s known since his school days. Initially formed when they were just kids to help each other deal with bullies, the Kult stayed in contact over the years, occasionally calling on each other for assistance with increasingly “grown up” issues.

An email Snow receives from one of the members calling for a meeting leads to the group facing the most grown up issue possible: murder. At the meeting, Snow learns that the wife of one of his friends has been raped and not only does his friend intend to seek revenge, he expects his fellow Kult members to assist. He argues that the timing is perfect for them to kill his wife’s rapist, because if they do so in a sufficiently gruesome manner it will be blamed on The Oracle.

Though he’d always been there for the Kult in the past, Snow can’t agree to such extreme action. That is, not until his supposed friends inform him that if he doesn’t help, including supplying them with the inside information necessary to copy the unique m.o. of The Oracle, they will reveal to his superiors all the previous questionable activities in which Snow has participated. Caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, Snow caves and assists in the killing. And that is when things go from merely screwed up to genuinely life threatening, because following their attempt to frame The Oracle for the murder they commit the Kult members begin getting knocked off themselves.

In The Oracle Jeffrey has conjured up one of the nastiest, most perversely creative serial killers in recent memory, which makes it all the more impressive that Jeffrey did not make his protagonist an über-Detective. Quite the contrary, Snow spends most of the story frustrated, one step behind, and continuously making extremely questionable decisions based on emotion rather than logic… which makes him a believable and sympathetic lead.

The tension and stakes rise to almost stifling levels as Snow races to discover The Oracle’s identity before he finds himself in the crosshairs, setting the stage for a truly disturbing showdown in The Oracle’s decidedly creepy lair. Definitely not for the faint-of-heart, The Kult is a gripping read that’s part horror, part mystery, part police procedural, and completely in-your-face.

- The Tunnels: Book Trailer -