Dead Gone

October 17, 2016
Liverpool Det. Insp. David Murphy pursues a wily serial killer in British author Veste’s craftily plotted debut. A note found on the first victim, college student Donna McMahon, indicates that the killer performed experiments involving drugs on the 20-year-old woman (she “wanted to die. She begged for an end. Not because she was in pain, or through fear. She believed she could see the afterlife”). Two more bodies surface in the next four days. As Murphy and his able assistant, feisty Det. Sgt. Laura Rossi, focus their investigation on the City of Liverpool University’s psychology department, to which all the victims had some connection, pressure on the beleaguered detective mounts both from the press calling for his removal and a killer who seems to be targeting him as his next experiment. Though the murderer’s grandiose scholarly claims for the carnage pale in the light of day, and the pivotal character of Murphy’s now-estranged wife remains underdeveloped, Veste keeps this gritty procedural moving through the shocking final revelations. Agent: Philip Patterson, Marjacq Scripts (U.K.).

November 1, 2016
The abduction of a university student sets off a dark chain of events in Veste's U.S. debut.Student Jemma Barnes is kidnapped when she takes a taxi home after a night of clubbing. While her estranged boyfriend, Rob (and apparently, nobody else), panics over Jemma's disappearance, other dead bodies begin showing up around Liverpool--accompanied by long, florid, and rather pretentious letters referring to shady CIA experiments decades earlier. The case improbably goes to Detective David Murphy, who is still damaged from the recent murder of his parents and his own marital problems. (His partner, Laura Rossi, is never fleshed out as a character.) The killer's identity is revealed early in the book, and Murphy and Rossi manage to overlook the obvious culprit while pegging nearly everybody else as a suspect. That's not the only logistical howler in the plot: at one point Jemma overpowers her captor and escapes; instead of running straight to the police she turns around to attempt another rescue and gets herself captured again. Rob also makes a fateful misstep that most people with good sense would have avoided. Veste peppers the chapters with some weighty quotes about death and grieving, but it's hard to take a thriller too seriously when the cops are clueless and the killer is a bit of a bore. The obligatory Silence of the Lambs-style torture scenes don't help, nor does a crucial plot twist in which a main character gets a highly unlikely lucky break. A thriller whose ambitions aren't matched by its dead-silly plot twists.

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November 15, 2016
Veste is out to work some changes on a stock cop-story situation. Here's a grumpy middle-aged copDetective Inspector David Murphy of the Liverpool policewith a painful history of murdered parents and a wrecked marriage. Reporters are forever badgering him. He's constantly being called in for a chewing-out from by his boss. Detective Sergeant Laura Rossi is Murphy's smart-mouthed, salty, and underrated partner. Their quarry is a serial killer who pins boastful notes on the bodies of his victims and gives windy speeches to an intended victim. Veste lifts this out of the routine by placing it in a university setting and by keeping the mood unrelentingly grim. Sometimes the latter backfires, as when he details the thoughts of a victim as she disintegrates. The scene is almost too sad to bear. And the account of an evisceration is purely horrifying. The novel is more successful as a police procedural than as a psychological thriller, probably because we've learned that hot air, even from smart psychos, is still hot air.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)