Malevolent by E.H. Reinhard

The best thing I can say about this book is that it is fast paced.  You hurtle through the pages in a mad rush to the end.  There are two reasons for this, one is that the writing style is such that it propels you through the book the second is that you can't wait to get to the end of it.

The murders are graphic and strangely compelling.  Certainly not a methodology that I have come across in the multitude of books and TV programmes of this genre I have watched.  I also enjoyed the fact that the killer did not want his victims to die, he wanted them to live, to be his branded legacy.

Unfortunately, away from that the procedural story is, I am sorry to say, boring.  The characters are all flat and stereotypical and no empathy could be felt for any of them.  Away from the originality of the murders, the behaviours of the protagonist are laughably easy to predict and you know how this is all going to pan out and how. 

I can see that the author was trying to give a more realistic view of the procedures in place to investigate a dumped body and I do applaud them for that.  In fact the plotting was pretty good (if predicatable, but then we know the cop will always get his man or woman when going in to these tales) and the writing was pacy and strong.  what let this down for me was the complete lack of any reality to the characters.  All the usual cop tropes were there and nobody was anything more than two-dimensional and restricted to the paper and ink they were created from.  Because this genre is so predictable to make a real impact the characters need to be fresh and realistic and lack of such when held up against an overfull library section means that it will always be marked very poorly.

Not for me and I am reluctant to risk any more in the series - I am strangely tempted to see what twisted way of dispatching victims E. H. Reinhard can come up with next so may give the next one in the series a go on a slow reading day

**Review originally published January 23rd, 2018**