Marketed as Mindhunter meets Hannibal Lecter, this book synopsis had me right from the hook. We follow detectives Marti Zucco and her partner, Neil Cavanaugh, as they look for the killer who has been branding and mutilating their victims into grotesque angels. Their search leads them all around the Boston area as they try to connect the dots between their very diverse victims and the secrets they held. This is a fantastically crafted detective thriller and the comparisons to Thomas Harris are well-earned. This book was nearly perfect for me right up until the last 5 pages or so which was a real disappointment.
Overall, this novel has a fantastic atmosphere and setting. It is a split POV with most chapters following Marti and Neil's investigation, but we do get some chapters from the killer's POV as well as flashbacks to 1600s Boston. Märgen's descriptions are hauntingly beautiful yet simple so the reader doesn't get bogged down with the prose. The narrative is almost deceptively simple but manages to build on itself over the course of a scene to really increase the atmospheric setting. These more simple scenes are then used to highlight the occasional dream or possible hallucinations that some characters have. These dream sequences are extremely vivid and often unsettling and bizarre which only added to the overall tone of the novel. The best comparison for the overall tone would be the Hannibal TV series - it is very similar with the dream-like sequences, the brutal killings, and the pockets of dry humor stuck in odd places. (The Hannibal TV series is, in my opinion, one of the most perfectly written and structured TV series I've ever seen and I think everyone should watch it). Marti's partner Neil is a great tension release with his smooth talking witnesses and occasional jokes. He felt like a sort of *wink wink nudge nudge* sense of humor which worked well to ease up the tension in a scene just enough for the reader to take a breath before diving back into the darkness.
The overall plotting of the investigation was very well done. With all the detective fiction books I've read and TV shows I've watched, I can often predict what turn the case may take or what 'secret' the detectives would discover next. However, in this case, I was completely blown away at what I felt were original and unique avenues for the investigation to go. It was still a standard investigation, no rule breaking or going rogue or anything like that. But when they enter the home of the third victim and find it littered with [thing I can't say because of spoiler reasons] I was pleasantly surprised that I in no way called what they would find. I thought the investigation followed all the leads to their fullest extent before completely excluding that line of inquiry. I do wish we would have gotten more action in the investigation - it was mostly Marti and Neil driving around Boston asking questions (which I fully acknowledge is like 99% of actual police work). I thought the chapters in the killer's POV were interesting and did a good job of characterizing the killer, but I think they could have been used to amp up the action if we got the killer watching the victims or their mental state in the aftermath of the kills. Overall, the 'thriller' aspects really ramped up in the last 10% of the book and up until then it was a pretty standard police investigation with no real threats of danger or thriller. However, the investigation was still really interesting and I didn't find it dry or boring.
Now on to where I feel the novel took a really hard nose dive: the ending. In general, my issues with the ending can be wrapped up in the fact that there wasn't any sort of come down or resolution chapter. There's the big confrontation at the end and then, if this was a movie, it would snap to black and credits would roll. I've never met a book that handled the ending this way and liked how it was done. Most of the time, it simply leads to a big case of emotional whiplash where the story was cruising along at 60mph and then hit the brick wall that is the end of the book. In this case, however, the lack of resolution chapter left me with pretty significant questions that I felt needed to be answered. And I don't usually mind open-ended books, but there's endings that are open ended because that's how life is and there are endings that are open-ended due to plot lines not getting tied up properly. And, to me, this novel falls into the latter category.
It is nearly impossible to explain further without giving spoilers, so I'm going to be as vague as possible and hopefully this makes sense. A few chapters from the end, there's a big event happens that shatters our main character's world and makes her start to question everything in her life. Then, in the final pages of the book, the main character states that event didn't happen like the reader thought it happened so it basically negates the main character's emotional growth. However, that statement was made during the final confrontation and could have very well been a lie to save the main character. If that was the case, then that's fine. But the issue is that it isn't made clear one way or the other so now, as the reader, I'm left wondering if our main character is having a sort of mid-life crisis or if everything is going to more or less go back to normal because the big event didn't really happen. Another issue was the very last line in the book - it implies that there was some sort of emotional arc in regards to a very specific part of the main character's past but the previous mentions of this part of the main character in the novel didn't seem that important. It seemed like the main character had pretty much gotten past that part of her life as much as she possibly could and accepted it. So I was confused as to why she chose to say those last words in the story and why Märgen chose to end the novel after those words. I guess they didn't hit as powerfully as the last words of a novel should and left me wondering if I was a big idiot and missed something when I was reading.
Probably the part I liked the most about this novel was the flashbacks to 1600s Boston and the puritans/witch trials. Of course, the book is called The Puritan so the reader knows these flashbacks will become relevant to the plot at some point, but it isn't clear at the beginning just how everything is connected. In fact, all the pieces don't fall together until the last 25% of the book so until that point, these flashbacks serve as mostly atmosphere building scenes. When everything is tied together at the end and the reader finds out what the trials in the 1600s have to do with the present day murders, it really pays off. That final puzzle piece falling into place was *chef kiss* perfection. Until that point, I wasn't really sure how I felt about these POV chapters because they seemed so disjointed from the present day murder investigation but now, looking back, they were probably my favorite parts of the whole novel.
A fantastically paced and structured detective thriller. Very atmospheric investigation with enough dark gruesome parts to satisfy fans of Mindhunter/Thomas Harris/Criminal Minds. Ending is a bit abrupt, but until that point, this is one of the best written detective thrillers I've read in a long time.
318 pages
Thanks to NetGalley for providing the ARC. This book was published September 3, 2020.
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