Saul Black

When she’s called to the murder scene, the last thing San Francisco Homicide detective Valerie Hart is expecting is for Katherine Glass to walk back into her life. Six years earlier, revulsion and fascination had gripped the nation in equal measure, as beautiful, intelligent, charming—and utterly evil—Katherine Glass had been convicted on six counts of Murder One. But the freshly-mutilated corpse in the ground-floor apartment bears all the hallmarks of Katherine’s victims. And then there’s the note, with its chilling implications. Addressed to Valerie. To stop the slaughter, Valerie has no choice. She must ask Katherine Glass to help her decipher the killer’s twisted message. But that means re-entering the pitch-black labyrinth that is Katherine’s mind, and this time Valerie isn’t so sure which one of them will survive.

A Novel

LoveMurder

Ipek

What follows is a review of Lovemurder that is more response paper than review — or maybe one of those reaction videos where people film themselves watching Game of Thrones or something. What I mean to say is, I offer no summary or details about the plot, characters and so on, and it might offer you more joy if you’ve already read the book. 

I read this back to back with Terry Eagleton’s On Evil by pure chance (...or is it?) and Eagleton’s view of evil as a sort of lack or negation, a nothingness rather than an entity in its own right — itself derived from his blend of mediaeval theology and emancipatory politics, or tragic humanism as he likes to call it, as far as I can tell — complemented the vision of evil I encountered in this book. Interestingly, though, not right away: for a good portion of the novel I was on the fence about whether it amounted to anything more than a glamorization, a fuck you to the middle class values it construes as good, so it has no other dignified option than to be evil. A very well-spoken and elegantly constructed fuck you, but still. So I was very pleased to find out, or be convinced that yes, it does. There is sympathy without empathy here, an understanding that doesn’t yield itself to a fusion with that which it understands, that is not overwhelmed by it. I know that at this point in time, culturally, empathy is the dominant value — you have to be it to understand it, or to be granted the right to speak about it, whereas sympathy is looked down on, more or less: better than cold-hearted indifference, but uncool (and inconvertible to symbolic capital) in that it refuses to give itself away completely to whatever is at hand. Yet I will argue that sympathy — and not empathy — is the crowning achievement of any fiction writer worth reading, and Duncan nails it here. George Eliot would have enjoyed this book. (Or am I getting carried away? I don’t know.)


Some stray observations: I think that this is a big step-up from The Killing Lessons, the previous (and first) book in the Valerie Hart series. Writers of literary fiction trying their hand at genre writing are the occasion for all kinds of debates (not the least of which is about whether this distinction is really valid — I think it is; yes, I’m snobbish that way) but one thought I’ve recently been having is, what about the power of restricted, clearly defined forms? If we can agree that the precision of a sonnet or a villanelle as a form can be, itself, the instrument of dazzling artistic expression in the right hands, might we not argue that the same applies to genre writing? Even though ninety percent of what is published under that label is crap? This is a way of thinking about the demarcation lines between literary fiction and genre fiction that would serve something other than the advancement of marketing strategies. And to finish on that note of jumping boundaries, I was pleased to catch one of the main characters quoting Duncan from another book of his, saying that she read this thing once in a book (it occurs to me that it might be Duncan quoting someone else in the original instance, but the quote does read like him). Of course she did, because isn’t that the overarching theme of this book, even above the beyond good and evil stuff? That detective work is analoguous to fiction writing in all of the ways that matter, and that to talk about one is to talk about the other? Down these mean streets a man must go, etc.

Laura

It was just earlier this month I reviewed Saul Black's debut, The Killing Lessons. While it wasn't my favorite mystery- there was a little too much going on and it had a dragging problem- it was still a good, solid debut thriller that showed a ton of promise. I liked Black's writing, and the ideas he came up with. 

And this novel is much tighter than his first. It was more focused by far- the only thing going on was the central case, there wasn't a million other little threads to follow up on. I mean, not everything was fixed- sex was still a big part of the book, but I'm starting to think this is something that's just going to become a part of reading Saul Black's books. The vibe he's clearly going for is dark and twisted and sexy, and I'm cool with that. Especially when this book is even more fucked up than the first.

The characters came across as a lot stronger, too. Valerie is still the smart, capable detective, but without the extra melodrama of being both an alcoholic and lovesick for her ex. Nick proved a welcome addition to the plot, and his banter-heavy dialogue ended up being my favorite. I also think Will especially shined in this novel, and I ended up not hating most of the side characters, which is amazing for me. 

Continue reading this review on my blog here: https://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/2...

LoveMurder A Novel

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