The Laughterhouse

Starred review from July 9, 2012
A brutal sadist stalks Christchurch, New Zealand, in Cleave’s compelling third noir thriller featuring PI Theo Tate (after 2011’s Collecting Cooper). The down-and-out Tate, a former cop who yearns to return to the police force, remains haunted by a case he investigated 15 years earlier—the rape and murder of a girl in an abandoned slaughterhouse, whose defaced sign gives the novel its horrifyingly ironic title. When a “spree killer” strikes one victim after another in an appalling day of terror, then kidnaps and unspeakably tortures a physician and his three young daughters, Tate and his former police partner, Carl Schroder, who’s burning out just as Tate’s finding his emotional footing again, gradually untangle the killer’s demented motives. Piano wire–taut plotting, Tate’s heart-wrenching losses and forlorn hopes, and Cleave’s unusually perceptive gaze into the maw of a killer’s madness make this a standout chapter in his detective’s rocky road to redemption. Agent: Jane Gregory, Gregory and Company.

August 1, 2012
In Cleave's (Collecting Cooper, 2011, etc.) third psycho-thriller, Theodore Tate is the quintessential flawed hero, a damaged soul hunting deviants in a forest of moral quandaries. The disgraced Christchurch detective, released after serving a term for drunken driving, struggles along as a private investigator. Tate meets his friend and detective Carl Schroder at a police funeral and follows him to a boozy wake. A murder is reported, and Tate finds himself the "guy giving a drunk detective a lift to a crime scene." One murder turns to two, then three, and then a kidnapping of a psychiatrist and his three young daughters. The case's complexity soon has Tate provisionally returned to duty. The serial assassin, Caleb Cole, is revealed early. Cole's daughter was brutally assaulted and murdered in an abandoned slaughterhouse, a case where Tate first confronted the hell released by a twisted mind. The novel is less a character study than a dissection of the need for, and cost of, revenge. Cole spent 15 years imprisoned for killing his daughter's murderer, James Whitby, only to be released obsessed with destroying everyone who played a part in putting Whitby on the streets after his first assault--the defense attorney, jury foreman, defense psychiatrist, character witness. Cleave's back story follows multiple narrative threads, including one exploring Tate's own loss of a daughter to a drunken driver, an accident that also left his beloved wife in a coma. That tragedy spurred him to commit his own act of singular revenge, one suspected but never proven, one that opens a window to Cole's torment. With scenes as shocking as Cole's amputation of a child's finger, Cleave's horrific narrative takes no prisoners, with the bloody action relentlessly ricocheting around Christchurch at a pace that leaves the detectives near collapse and readers sometimes overwhelmed. An intense and bloody noir thriller, one often descending into a violent abyss reminiscent of Thomas Harris, creator of Hannibal Lecter.

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Starred review from August 1, 2012
Here's a real mystery. How can this New Zealand cop novel be such a knockout when it's home to every cliche, every stereotype, every hackneyed plot device known to the genre? Hero Theodore Tate is an ex-cop who lost his job for boozing and beating suspects. His daughter is dead. His wife is in an irreversible coma. He's short of money and drives an elderly clunker. Then there's the villain, a serial killer whose victims have something in common, after all. Add the kind of rhyming plot that nobody does any moreeverything is connected, no strings hangingand you get the last thing you would expect, a wonderful book. Cleve manages a fresh imagining of these chestnuts, so we share the tension as the man with the knife closes in on the little girl. The scenes with the comatose wife are beautiful and moving rather than pathetic. The inner musings of the characters have a poetic power, even a quirky humor. The final effect is that tingling in the neck hairs that tells us an artist is at work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)