DNF @ 44%
I discovered this book when one of my closest friends, who is a big fan of the author’s podcast, passed me her copy of this book. Having heard all the promos for it, she was excited to read it and got it right when it came out. She read it quickly – it’s not long – and passed it to me. Not having any pre-conceived notions of the book, (I don’t listen to the podcast myself) I went into this one blind. And, unfortunately, I don’t think I had the same experience as the friend that lent me the book.
The Premise:
Dr. Wren Muller is the best forensic pathologist in the New Orleans area and she works closely with the local police department. When a string of murders begins to crop up, it’s up to Wren to help the police department get to the bottom of who might be the “Butcher in the Bayou.”
Jeremy has had a penchant for dissecting living things that goes back almost as far as his obsession with serial killers. As he lives out his sadistic schemes, he finds pleasure in leaving behind clues and toying with the police department – even more so with the lead medical examiner, Wren Muller.
Will Wren be able to outsmart the Butcher when their paths collide?
My Thoughts:
I picked up this book in good faith. I didn’t know what it was about, but as Wren mentions when this murderer is given his quippy title: “You had me at Butcher.” I’m a bit of a true crime junkie myself and a serial killer called “The Butcher” is enough to sign me up. That being said, I quickly began having reservations about this book.
There are a few things that really stood out to me that are worth mentioning because they were things that pulled me out of the story in big ways.
First, the author leaves a lot of the heavy lifting of this story to the reader (in a way that feels like inexperience rather than being intentional). Written in short choppy sentences, this story bounces from one thing to the next quickly – almost jarringly so – in a way that is all narration and no actual characterization. (It’s all “tell” and no “show”.) There were multiple points where I found myself re-reading sentences trying to figure out how we got from point A to point B in a single sentence or two.
And I think that’s exacerbated by the fact that this story is told in close 3rd person, present tense. We’re not spending any significant time exploring characters thoughts and motives in this story (aspects that usually make for a juicy, intriguing cat-and-mouse thriller). Instead, the story reads more like a grocery list than a narrative, telling us – in those short, choppy sentences – what everyone is doing and saying. But it quickly starts to feel mechanical and overly simplified. And because of it, the tension one would expect in a thriller is severely lacking and most of the motives/mentalities/thought processes/etc. are just left for the reader to assume on their own.
Secondly, I struggled with the sentence to sentence inconsistencies in this story. Things like the main character being inside her car and being able to hear the both sides of a phone conversation going on inside another character’s car. (Which might work if the POVs throughout the story were different, but they aren’t. Even so far as at some points, it’s mentioned that Wren can hear the other sides of these phone conversations, when it doesn’t make sense for her to be able to do so.)
And the sharp-hearing phenomenon doesn’t end with Wren. When Jeremy starts playing “The Most Dangerous Game” with his victims in the woods, he starts playing music through a sound system. In one sentence, a character has her fingers in her ears (implying that the music is loud as there’s no other explanation for it) but barely a page later, Jeremy can hear conversations in the woods, perfectly clearly, through a surveillance camera. Not long after that, he is stalking his victims and can hear characters whispering (despite the music that we end up quickly forgetting about) without missing a single word. Though, naturally, they can’t hear him as he whispers quippy one-liners in response to their actions. Which leads me to believe this is just a device only used when it’s convenient and, as a reader reading a book that’s not high fantasy with sharp-hearing elves, it’s a bit frustrating.
And the inconsistencies continue in other ways throughout the book as well. Wren can tell a character is on a personal call because he’s smiling while he talks on the phone. In, literally, the next sentence, we get to hear part of the conversation where he’s “sheepishly” apologizing for his behavior to his significant other. An alley that gets supposedly gets hundreds of people’s worth of foot traffic in a single night is also described as being an out-of-the-way place for discreet drug dealings and body dumping in the same paragraph.
Along the same lines as the inconsistencies, there are some things that just flat-out don’t make sense. I was left with a lot of questions when Jeremy “pats the cargo pocket on his right pant leg to confirm that it still holds the seventeen-inch serrated hunting knife.” Is a machete a hunting knife? How big are the pockets on men’s pants? How long is a man’s femur that, if he did have this behemoth in his pocket, he could still walk and bend his knee easily? Honestly, it just entirely took me out of the story. (And onto Google.)
Lasting Impressions:
I think the formatting of this book (in hardcover) should have been an omen. With surprisingly large margins, blank pages between the majority of chapters (so that all chapters began on the right hand side of a page spread), and the lengthy acknowledgements adding to a page count that was already shorter than your average thriller novel, this felt like a lot of effort was added to bulk this story up and make it seem like it was more than it was. It felt analogous to a teenager increasing the margins and the font size of punctuation to turn a barely 4 page essay into a 5 page one.
So while I’m sure fans of the podcast were quick to buy this book and perhaps enjoy her style of narrative, I found the writing – from a technical standpoint – to be disappointing and distracting. And on top of that, the story felt a bit lackluster anyway. I’m under the impression that the author works in the same field as Wren, so perhaps parts of this story might be semi-autobiographical, but the story didn’t feel like it brought anything more to the table than a re-run of Bones would. Though I will admit that I only got about halfway through the book, so perhaps it takes a turn in the latter half?
I don’t want to disparage or dissuade anyone, including this author, from being a writer. The world needs more creative minds and, from the synopsis, it sounds like this writer has a kernel of a really interesting story in her hands that, because of her profession, she can bring an interesting viewpoint to. (She reminds me a lot of Kathy Reichs, honestly.) But this book, as it stands, desperately needs a red pen taken to it .
