Book review: The Killing Lessons

SAUL BLACK’S serial killer yarn is plotted with the precision of a Swiss watch and ticks along until its explosive finale.

Saul Black

Orion, €19.99; ebook, €9.49

There is no big boring muddle in the middle. The killer is of course brutal and twisted and the scenes involving him are creepy, salty and nasty.

But the book has a palpable sense of good asserting itself in the midst of evil.

From the opening pages there is nowhere to hide. Xander the killer and his accomplice Paulie wreak bloody havoc in a family home at Christmas.

A mother and her young son are brutally slain. This sets in motion a number of threads in the story.

Firstly, the little girl in the family, Nell, manages to run away into the woods pursued by Paulie. She is injured and traumatised but scrambles to some kind of provisional safety.

Paulie returns to the charnel house and decides to tell Xander that the little girl has escaped.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to Valerie Hart, San Francisco detective, and her somewhat tormented love life and the thin ice her career is skating on in the homicide department.

Several other strands of the plot are also put in place early on, for instance a young woman who is abducted by Xander and Paulie, put into the boot of their car and taken to the torture chamber basement of their house.

The characters are vivid and credible and while the serial killer’s particular twist has a schematic neatness behind it that at times feels overly explicit and almost laughable in its particular derangement, even his character is brought satisfactorily to life.

The atmospheres are also persuasively described throughout.

Black’s style is short punchy chapters, often just three or four pages. And he doesn’t fall into the overly familiar device of crime novels of simply alternating goodie baddie scenes until the two come together and then it ends.

To an extent that can be an inevitable element of a book as carefully plotted as this one but he has so many pots on the boil he has the luxury of being able to move freely between several narrative strands.

Where the story demands it he will rest with one particular line.

And while there’s a reasonably big cast of characters it is always pretty clear what’s going on.

Black writes with sympathy and intelligence and gets no more ghoulish than the plot and characterisations require.

Allowing for the scariness that comes with the territory this is a solid, traditional old style crime novel, not bothered with metafiction knowingness and smartassed stylising and would make for a thumping good holiday read.