Written in Blood

Hello, it's Heather posting today! Oh my goodness. Just wow. This novel is phenomenal. It slightly reminded me of The Silkworm. I’ve been preparing for university, so it was a relief to tear myself away from the woes of how I’ll ever pay my student loans, and read this instead.

Information

Author: Layton Green

Published: November 2017

Publisher: Seventh Street Books

Length: 320 pages

Brief Description (from Amazon)

Detective Joe "Preach" Everson, a prison chaplain turned police officer, is coming home. After a decade tracking down killers in Atlanta, and with a reputation as one of the finest homicide detectives in the city, his career derailed when he suffered a mental breakdown during the investigation of a serial killer who was targeting children.

No sooner does Preach arrive at home in Creekville, North Carolina--a bohemian community near Chapel Hill--than a local bookstore owner is brutally killed, the first murder in a decade. The only officer with homicide experience, Preach is assigned to the case and makes a shocking discovery: the bookstore owner has been murdered in exactly the same manner as the pawnbroker in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

With the help of Ariana Hale, a law student and bibliophile who knew the victim, Preach investigates the local writer's community. As their questions increase, a second body is found, this time eerily resembling the crime scene in a famous Edgar Allan Poe novella. Preach and Ariana realize that their adversary is an intelligent, literate killer with a mind as devious as it is disturbed--and that one or both of them may be his next target.

(https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1633883612)

Review

The detective protagonist, Joe ‘Preach’ Everson, is investigating the murder of a bookstore owner who was killed in a way that had remarkable parallels to that of the murder in the classic novel Crime and Punishment. As the novel progresses, more murders with links to literary classics take place, and Preach frets that, in the crucial moment, he’ll repeat an error he made earlier in his career. Along with Officer Kirby and aided with the help of Ariana Hale, who adores reading, they try their hardest to catch the murderer before anyone else is killed.

The description throughout is thoughtful and illustrative, I particularly enjoyed the imagery of Damian Black’s house, which was pretty much the ideal horror writer’s home. The dialogue is also expressive and interesting. What really stands out is the plot, however. I found myself gasping out loud and texting friends frantically towards the end about the amazing twists and turns. As usual, I failed to guess who the culprit was – I love the feeling a reader gets when the detective finally realises who the killer is. The only slight criticism that could be put forward would be that everything is a little too convenient in terms of who-knows-who, but given that the place is quite small, and most of the main characters grew up in the area, this is definitely excusable.

Normally, I chastise authors for taking too much time to write about romance, but Ari is lovely and actually helpful in solving the crime; their relationship doesn’t distract from the story and develops at a natural pace. I think most readers can also relate to Ari, I’m sure most of us would love to work in a bookstore. And Preach is such a brilliant character. His backstory unfolds through his therapy sessions, making the reader really see how much suffering and guilt he’s endured (despite him never being at fault), it was a very clever idea to include the therapy sessions - lots of authors overlook the mental strain solving crime can have. I was delighted to have a protagonist who had emotions, empathy and vulnerabilities, and going against his past self. There’s a bit where Ari analyses him, and he does the same back, and it’s fascinating to see these impressions, and how they were formed.

There are some dark themes in the novel, so anyone under eighteen would not be advised to read this. Other than that, any fans of the dark crime genre will be sure to enjoy this. I’m definitely going to look out Layton Green’s books in the future, leave me a comment if you’ve read this!