The Hunted

February 2, 2009
An overly convoluted plot and stilted dialogue mar Barcomb's third crime novel (after Blood Tide
and Undercurrent
), the first in a projected series. The testimony of eight-year-old Tookie “Lucky” Gale, who watched her father, Paul, murder her mother, is enough to send Paul to jail for 21 years. After he's paroled, Paul sets out to find Lucky and get his revenge. Meanwhile, a string of gruesome homicides in Manhattan stump Det. Frank Russo, who's writing his own criminal justice book and yearns to make his legendary retired cop father proud. Frank soon suspects that the killer he's chasing is a woman, because of the crimes' disturbing sexual component, but he and his partner, Jerry Blodgett, hit one dead end after another as the body count climbs. Barcomb clumsily shifts among Frank, Lucky and Paul without ever revealing much about any of them, and the cop chatter in the station and at crime scenes sounds as if it were recycled from old TV shows or dated detective novels.

The crude writing of this insufficiently plotted thriller is perfectly matched by the poor quality of the recording. As a little girl, Lucky's testimony sent her father to prison for murdering her mother. Twenty-one years later, he's been paroled and is seeking his daughter either to reconcile with her or to rape and kill her--he can't decide which. Meanwhile, Lucky is proving herself as brutal a murderer as her father. Reader Mark Deakins manages to acceptably voice the dialogue with appropriate pitch and accent changes; however, his narration is stiff, choppy, and unengaging. In addition, the audio has a pronounced tinny, echoing sound, as if it had been recorded at the bottom of a teakettle. A.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine