Book review: Darkness haunts City of Light

Sam Blake's 'The Killing Sense' is fresh and thrilling and the short chapters will make you want to read just a couple more before bedtime

Crime writer Sam Blake is delivering a fresh and thrilling novel to her readers every year. Picture: Alice-Rose Jordan

• The Killing Sense 
• Sam Blake 
• Corvus, €14.99

Sam Blake, high in the ranks of Irish crime authors, is now undoubtedly a household name. With a fresh and thrilling novel being delivered to her readers annually, there are very few doing it like her.

The Killing Sense is no exception to her past works — it is both the previously mentioned fresh and thrilling, and yet so much more. 

Stepping out of Blake’s usual territory, her newest novel has readers sauntering around the glamorous streets of Paris while enjoying the frequently mentioned fresh coffee and pastries. 

That is until things start getting slightly out of hand and, to a sudden extreme, downright terrifying.

Kate Wilde, a single mom who has recently escaped the clutches of her abusive ex-husband, receives an interesting email on her phone: she has won a give-away. 

While most would be jumping up and down at the prospect of winning anything, never mind a prize so large, something strange is bothering Kate. 

She cannot, for the life of her, remember entering the giveaway for a luxury, all-expenses paid trip to Paris, bundled in with an exclusive perfume-making workshop.

After some convincing from her sister Orna, who has promised to mind Kate’s daughter, 10-year-old Hanna, she hops on the Eurostar and, before she knows it, arrives in the city of love.

It is evident by Blake’s descriptions of Paris that she has spent enough time there absorbing the atmosphere to perfectly bring the city to life in her book. 

From visits to sightseeing spots such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, one can almost forget in the beginning that the protagonist is being watched from dark alleyways — an expert technique of keeping the reader hooked while the seediness begins to grow behind the scenes.

While Kate meanders around the city, the narrator suddenly changes to a young college student, Agathe, and she happens to be on the search for her roommate, Sandrine, who mysteriously vanished without a word. 

It quickly becomes apparent that a serial killer is roaming Paris’s shadowy sewers, and he has a taste for redheads.

The novel is taken to the next level with a few chapters scattered throughout that are written by the mysterious killer, and you can’t help but feel a twinge of excitement at reading his creepy thoughts. 

Even with all the information that you learn alongside Kate, readers will be just as confused and overwhelmed as her, trying to get to the bottom of this insane scenario. 

Her first holiday in years is certainly not what she thought it would be.

While Kate is busy trying to reassure herself by saying that she’s merely over-reacting, the French journalism scene springs to life as decades-old murders are being opened again and investigated, an attempt at trying to nail down the vicious killer once and for all.

From threatening texts to being expertly manipulated, there are very few instances where the novel loses momentum. 

The short chapters will make you want to read just a couple more before bedtime, even if they do put a bit of distance between the characters and the reader.

There is so much happening in this book that it becomes a little bit hard to keep track of who’s who, with a cast of five narrators, two of whom the book could probably function without. 

It has plenty of twists but, towards the end where the stakes should be at their highest, they falter slightly, with the third act conflict splicing off in four directions.

Nevertheless, when the story ends, only one word comes to mind: “Wow.”

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