The Slaughter Man

June 8, 2015
Det. Constable Max Wolfe investigates the slaughter of all but one member of the Wood family, at their mansion within a gated community, in Parsons’s exciting but uneven second contemporary crime novel featuring the London police officer (after 2014’s The Murder Man). Someone uses a cattle gun to kill American Brad Wood, a sports agent; his British wife, Mary, a former Olympic skier; and their two teenage children, Marlon and Piper. Four-year-old Bradley Wood, the lone survivor, is kidnapped. In 1980, 17-year-old Peter Nawkins (aka the Slaughter Man) fatally shot four men on an Essex farm with a cattle gun. Could there be a connection? Mary’s sister and brother pressure the police to find Bradley. In looking into both the Nawkins and the Wood families, Wolfe uncovers a world of abuse, betrayal, and unimaginable violence. An appealingly sensitive single parent, Wolfe makes some unlikely elementary mistakes with grave personal consequences, but adrenaline-driven action scenes and winning characters more than compensate. Agent: Sloan Harris, ICM.

July 15, 2015
A family's brutal murder and the abduction of a small child set off an intense manhunt in this absorbing new thriller. New Year's Eve. Most of London is partying, and that's why no one at a large mansion in one of the city's toniest areas hears the teenage boy begging for assistance. When the child, his parents, and sister are found slaughtered like cattle and his 4-year-old brother missing, Max Wolfe and the other members of the Major Incident Team are on the case. The crime scene is horrific, but the biggest concern is the missing child, Bradley. The victims are no ordinary family, either. Both parents were Olympic athletes (the mother a well-known beauty and heiress known as the "Ice Virgin"). DCI Pat Whitestone leads the team into a countrywide search for the missing boy, but despite hundreds of leads, nothing pans out. When Wolfe and another investigator track down infamous criminal Peter Nawkins, once imprisoned for killing a father and his three sons using a cattle gun like the one the killer employed on the dead family, things start going sideways. Wolfe, as a father and investigator, is both likable and worthy of the reader's empathy, and the writing is top-notch, particularly when it comes to Wolfe's relationship with his daughter, Scout. But there are also a few head-shaking moments, most notably when either Wolfe or his team repeatedly-and for reasons that are neither well-explained nor logical-get their collective rear ends kicked going into situations where they are both outnumbered and outgunned. It doesn't take police experience to wonder why they didn't simply wait for adequate backup. Although Parsons' version of the Metropolitan Police make some puzzling mistakes in their investigation, the story is so absorbing that readers will forgive him the repeated bad judgment that leaves Wolfe's team limping.

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Starred review from September 1, 2015
Haunting and moving aren't words usually used to describe blood-soaked tales of madness and murder. Especially when the death weapon is a bolt gun of the kind slaughterhouses use to blast metal nubs into animals' brains. But those words apply here because Parsons' novel has startling emotional power, the result of brooding poetry gliding across a propulsive narrative. London homicide detective Max Wolfe is called upon to investigate the hideous murder of a gilded familybeautiful, wealthy, beloved. Parents and two children are dead, the third kidnapped. The suspect is a brain-damaged man who committed a similar murder 30 years ago but has been freed from jail, thanks to a terminal cancer diagnosis. Wolfe's quest takes him through the social hash of modern London: a gypsy camp, a call-girl ring, a drug house. He is beaten, stabbed, nearly buried alive, and it's all described in understated language that artfully provokes the reader into releasing a gush of emotion. As when the dead woman's sister sums up the whole 400 pages: The world is a sewer made by what men want. A remarkable novel on multiple levels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)