Hunting Ground

March 30, 2020
Holloway (Once unto the Breach) travels familiar terrain in this unremarkable serial killer novel. Evelyn Hutto has moved from Georgia, where she survived a traumatic experience that left her wary of all men, to Raven’s Gap, Mont., to work as the assistant collections manager at the Park County Museum. Unfortunately for her, the local bookstore owner, Jeff Roosevelt, is a predator, who views meeting Evelyn as a “good omen” that reawakens his misogynistic, murderous tendencies. Jeff’s violent streak isn’t a complete secret; police officer Hector Lewis, who’s nearing retirement, is still hoping to find evidence to implicate him in the disappearance, 15 years earlier, of Lewis’s wife and daughter. The plot unfolds from the perspectives of these three main characters. Jeff’s chapters open, heavy-handedly, with quotes from such notorious serial murderers as Albert Fish and Jeffrey Dahmer. Readers should be prepared for minimal suspense. Neither the prose nor the characters leave much of an impression.