★★★★☆ Play Dead, by Angela Marsons
** Ware spoilers ** A too-imaginary serial killer
Play Dead
Angela Marsons
** spoilers **
A too-imaginary serial killer
In Play Dead, the fourth novel of Angela Marsons's DI Kim Stone series, Kim and her team have the job of tracking down a serial killer. This one takes a step away from the focus on child abuse of the first three novels. The bigger difference, though, is that the murderer strikes me more as the product of lurid imagination than of solid psychological background. (I admit that I personally have only a Psych 101 background. My skepticism comes from general principles.) In the first three novels the baddies were psychopaths or sociopaths, and it was obvious that Marsons had done her research and was working hard to present psychopathic behavior more or less as it really is.
This time it felt as if the murderer was designed to be as luridly interesting as possible, without much reference to realism. Not surprisingly, child abuse creeps back in -- this is obviously Marsons's hang-up. The murderer turns out to have suffered abuse as a child and to be working through the resulting trauma, in a maximally dysfunctional way.
Play Dead still benefits from Marsons's skill at putting a lot of balls in the air and keeping them flying until the end. It's a pretty good detective story, fairly well told. I will continue reading.