Reviews for Hope to Die

The average rating for Hope to Die based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-06 00:00:00 David Jankovsky This is a professional and enjoyable entry in a superb series. Detective Scudder may be getting old (sixty-two years old in this adventure), but the series hardly show its age. And yet...there's a new darkness here--a forced, sensationalist darkness. And I doubt it bodes well for the future. The plot is interesting. There has been a bloody invasion of an upscale brownstone, and the couple who owned it have been murdered. The crime apparently has solved itself, for the two burglars have been discovered with their bags of loot, dead in a murder/suicide. But Matt soon begins to suspect that a third man may have been involved, a third man who may a dangerous, very clever criminal. I liked this book for the rare glimpse it gives us into Matt's life and its present consequences; we get to observe him with his two sons from a previous marriage, and their meeting leads to a moral problem that his present wife Elaine helps him solve. I also was intrigued by the personality of the murderer. Block allows us to get a rare glimpse of his killer from the inside, and we see the workings of the mind that produces characteristic crimes: it is a very clever mind, addicted to creating situations that are "too cute," filled with ironies, hidden clues and suggestive aliases. It is this "too cute" behavior that puts Matt Scudder on his trail. Perhaps most memorably, we are allowed to watch someone commit murder once for profit only to find he wishes to commit more for pleasure. He finds that he enjoys it, and his transformation into a serial killer makes this novel particularly terrifying. Still...it seemed to me that Block relishes the mind of the killer a little too much, that he becomes a voyeur intruding on his own vision. Many of the explicit details he relates to us are shocking--and titillating--but finally these narrative shocks seem a little too easy and leave the reader with a sour taste in the mouth. Bottom line: the murderer takes over too much of the action and puts our hero Matt in the background. The ending terrifies and disturbs the reader, true, but ultimately it does not satisfy.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-03-24 00:00:00 Tracey Young [ Two or three other things really bothered me about this book: First of all, the killer's general plan seemed awfully far-fetched. His aim is to ultimately own the house of the couple he murdered, but his method of accomplishing this is scarcely believable. Secondly, the killer escapes in the end. The police and Scudder believe that he has been burned beyond recognition in a fire. They realize there's the possibility that he has faked his death and escaped but they are generally agreed that the guy is dead. He isn't. The book closes with the killer riding off into the sunset, apparently setting up a sequel. This leads to the last thing that bothered me about the book in that the killer gets the last word. Block writes a very nice chapter, narrated by Scudder, that would have been a good finish. But instead of ending there, he tacks on one last chapter from the killer's POV as he drives away, planning his next adventure. I never thought I'd live to see the day when Matthew Scudder could not even get the last word in a Matthew Scudder novel... (hide spoiler)]