Trail of Blood: A Novel of Suspense Book

Lisa Black, Trail of Blood (Morrow, 2010)

Full disclosure: this book was provided me free of charge by Amazon Vine.

The whole time I was reading Trail of Blood, aside from being annoyed with myself that I hadn't done my research and didn't realize I was dropping into a series with book three, I kept pointing out things to myself and saying "you really shouldn't like this book. Look at what Lisa Black is doing here!". And there wasn't a point where I was ever actually able to refute any of those things I was pointing out to myself. But as a seventeen-year resident of the Mistake on the Lake, I found the subject matter intrinsically interesting (a modern serial killer beings recreating the Torso murders from the thirties), and Ms. Black has enough of a way with words that I powered through a four-hundred-page novel in a weekend (and it was a weekend with lots of family plans, so I didn't ave much time to read). Which makes the short answer "if you're in the mood for a solid, if predictable, turn-your-brain-off mystery, this is the book for you!". Which is absolutely true; if you pick this up and you're a fan of a solid genre mystery, you won't regret popping the cover price.

Plot: Black turns in her third Theresa MacLean novel, in which the forensic investigator is called to what may well be the scene of an undiscovered Torso victim, a seventy-five-year-old corpse walled up in a building in Kingsbury Run slated for demolition. Not long after that, a young woman's body washes up at Burke Lakefront Airport, in almost the exact spot where the first victim conclusively linked to the Torso killer had washed up over three-quarters of a century before'and in almost the exact same condition. MacLean, along with her cousin Frank (a homicide detective), a pushy-but-charming journalist, and the vice president of the local railroad preservation society, find themselves both trying to solve the original Torso killings and stop the modern madman before he can finish his recreation.

(As a side note: every Torso killer book I read makes me wonder: why is it that an obscure computer game is the only place I've ever found speculation that the Torso killer was responsible for the death of Elizabeth Short? Inquiring minds wanna know.)

The first thing that my head pointed out to me as I was reading this is how far overboard Black goes in the Cleveland references. I get that place references are a good thing, when they're done inline, and not overused; Jim Butcher gives the Dresden Files books, for example, a very good grounding in Chicago geography without going out of his way. To the other extreme you have Brian Keene, whose Ghoul was so drenched in mid-eighties references (not specific place, but you know the drill) that the first half of the book was somewhat painful to read. Black doesn't go quite that far, but the operative word in that phrase is "quite". I flinched a couple of times. (Example: Black has MacLean go out of her way to mention a book on the Torso killings that was written by a local author, and it's done kind of awkwardly.)

Then there are the red herrings. It's pretty obvious both in the modern storyline and the 1930s storyline that Black is setting up different possibles for the killer, but there wasn't much of a point where the alternate theories of the crime had me wanting to pony up the cover price for either of them. Then in both cases came one clue that cemented the correct suspect way before expected, which killed a good deal of the suspense.

And yet, despite all this, I tore through it. And I'm torn enough about it to have changed the rating I originally gave it three times just while writing this review. Ultimately, I think, the charges leveled against the book, both here and in other reviews, are minor (yes, the characters are shallow, but at least I want to know more about them, which often isn't the case) when compared to the simple readability of the thing. Recommended, but be aware that opinions vary widely on this one. ***