Hangman

March 3, 2014
Talty’s fast-paced sequel to 2013’s Black Irish breaks no new ground and relies on clichés common to serial killer novels. Brilliant Buffalo, N.Y., police detective Abbie Kearney and her colleagues are on high alert when a serial killer nicknamed the Hangman escapes while being transferred to Attica, killing one of his guards. Years before, the Hangman held the city hostage as he stalked and killed teenage girls from Buffalo’s wealthy neighborhood. Despite the intense hunt, the Hangman kidnaps another girl. When higher-ups tell Abbie to back off her investigation, she turns to the Network, a shady group of ex-cops and longtime residents from the County, the city’s working-class Irish section, where Abbie was raised. The Network moves outside the law to get results, and Abbie knows once she teams with them, it puts her on dangerous moral ground. The smooth narrative and evocative look at Buffalo’s history don’t disguise the predictable twists or the too obvious villain. Agent: Scott Waxman, Waxman Leavell Literary.

April 15, 2014
Five years after he spread terror among Buffalo's teenage girls and their parents, a notorious killer is back in the saddle. Corrections Officer Joe Carlson may be the premier transporter of dangerous criminals, but he botches Marcus Flynn's prison transfer so badly that Flynn escapes, and Carlson pays with his life. Every cop in Erie County, it seems, is deployed to search for Flynn, dubbed Hangman when he was convicted of strangling four high school students. The officer in charge is Detective Absalom Kearney, who's already earned quite a reputation for resourcefulness and insubordination (Black Irish, 2013). It's Abbie who figures out where Flynn is headed; Abbie who decides against all advice to take a closer look at Walter Myeong, whose daughter Maggie was among the victims, and Frank Riesen, whose daughter Sandy's body was never recovered; and Abbie who in the end makes a deal with the devil when she accepts the help of the Murphia, the area's sinister network of ex-cops and their collaborators, to pursue the leads Chief Albert Perelli tells her to leave alone. And Hangman, who's already murdered Martha Stoltz and set his sights on snooty Nardin Academy student Katrina Lamb, is well worth every dark deal Abbie can make. There's nothing especially original about the clues, the detection or the killer's avowed intention of "saving the girls. From something worse than death," but Talty works the familiar ground with enough assurance to keep you burning the midnight oil--or, in this case, coal. Less gritty and more streamlined than Abbie's debut: an expertly judged dose of adrenaline whose cast can only hang on for dear life till the final crash of cymbals.

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April 1, 2014
Readers will recognize this opening scene: a vicious killer is being transported to a maximum-security prison. The driver stops the van on a lonely stretch of road, frog-marches the killer to cliff's edge in one last attempt to learn the location of a victim's grave. What happens next, though, is not exactly what we're expecting. Talty's sullen novel is like that, deploying conventional situations and then upending them. Buffalo homicide detective Abbie Kearney is called in to hunt the psycho, and she meets an almost-but-not-quite-standard cast: the police chief under pressure, the prison psychiatrist with a revealing file, the reluctant partner, and a boozy old cop with access to a shadowy world distressingly close to the killer's. Fights, chases. Time spent in the mind of the killerhappily, very little time because Talty knows that madness is dullthen an irrelevant observation about an irrelevant detail that busts the whole case open. Finally we learn what really happened at that cliff's edge, and the author brings this grim tale to a grim and satisfying conclusion. Stick with this one; it delivers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2013

Author of the nonfiction New York Times best seller Empire of Blue Water, Talty did nicely with his first thriller, Black Irish. Here, policewoman Abbie Kearney returns to track a nasty killer called the Hangman who has escaped from jail.

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