The Bedlam Detective (2012) by Stephen Gallagher

The Bedlam Detective (2012) by Stephen Gallagher: The second of Stephen Gallagher's Sebastian Becker series, in which Becker investigates whether mentally unstable nobles in Edwardian England should be committed. That's for the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy. Seriously. That was a thing.

In The Bedlam Detective, Becker has been sent to the coastal English countryside to investigate and fill a report on the sanity of  Sir Owain Lancaster. Lancaster led a disastrous expedition into the Amazon Basin several years previous and then emerged claiming that nearly the entire party was killed by giant monsters. He's a pariah now, but is he crazy?

But as Becker arrives, two girls go missing. Becker, a former Pinkerton, gets involved in the search for the girls right off the train. And then, having proven himself useful to investigating detective Stephen Reed, Becker gets more and more involved in the mystery of the girls, the mystery of Owain Lancaster, the mystery of the monsters... well, a lot of mystery!

Gallagher spikes his novel with lots of intriguing historical details without overloading the reader or getting too far away from the mystery. There's a lot of modern psychology involved -- among other things, Becker's 18-year-old son is a high-functioning autistic savant in a world where the term 'autism' does not exist. 

But the mystery of Lancaster is also probed from a psychological POV, often ranging into the possibility of a serial killer and his motivations though the term wouldn't be coined for another 60 years. Gallagher also touches upon Great Britain's Suffragette movement through another major character.

Telling details also include the utterly botched collection of evidence at a crime scene, infuriating Becker, and a marvelous sequence in London with a thick fog having rolled in. Becker's son is sensitively and believably drawn -- autism hasn't given him "super-powers" as is often portrayed in current TV and cinema, but it does allow him to help out on the case because of his intense powers of close analysis and organization.

Everything will dovetail together by the end. An early version of the personal movie camera will play a part. So, too, South American caterpillars and an odd early example of the automobile. There will be tragedy. And maybe even a pay raise for Becker, who desperately needs a new suit and whose office at Bethlehem Hospital is so squalid that he takes all his messages at a meat-pie stand. Highly recommended.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2018) by Michele McNamara

I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (2018) by Michele McNamara, Paul Haynes, Billy Jensen, and Patton Oswalt:

The Golden State Killer of the sub-title got that name from author Michele McNamara 20 years after his last known crime, named thusly by McNamara on the Internet because GSK's other nicknames -- The Original Night Stalker, The East Area Rapist, EAR/ONS, and The Diamond Knot Killer -- did not cover the full range of the rapist-murderer's crimes. 

He had instead been given different names in different areas of California at different times between 1976 and 1986. He has never been identified or caught.

McNamara was married to comic actor Patton Oswalt. She died of complications related to prescription medication (probably) in 2016 at the age of 46. She left behind Oswalt, a daughter, and the unfinished manuscript that would become this book. Oswalt, lead researcher Paul Haynes, and investigative journalist Billy Jensen finished the book, or at least completed it.

It's a solid, clearly unfinished 'True Crime' text. What makes it different than a lot of True Crime books is that it's as much about McNamara's (self-admittedly and in the title) obsessive search for the identity of the Golden State Killer. 

Her search uses Internet resources and message boards, real-life interviews and consultations, and a lot of sifting through the seemingly endless boxes of evidence. But she also outlines the reasons for her interest in the case, the toll it takes, and her family background.

McNamara isn't an elegant prose writer (and someone should be severely chastised for letting the neologistic abomination 'pre-planning' through the editorial net on several occasions). This isn't Truman Capote's In Cold Blood or even Erik Larson's The Devil In the White City. What it is, is a straightforward crime story that gradually mutates into another riff on Ahab and Moby Dick. That McNamara's insomnia over the last few years of her life led to the prescribed drugs that may have killed her only makes the Moby Dick comparison more poignant, especially with the killer uncaught.

So we're left at the end with facts, aided by advances in DNA technology, and aided even more by crowd-sourcing the investigation via message boards and McNamara's own website. McNamara speculates on crimes that may have been committed by the man who would become the Golden State Killer prior to 1976. She also speculates on why the GSK went from brutal rapist to a serial murderer of couples, on why he stopped, and on whether he lives today.

But McNamara is also attentive to the limits of speculation, detailing failed leads and referring to wrong assumptions in other, solved serial-killer cases. It's grim stuff at times. Here there be monsters. 

I wish the completists had found a better way -- or better writers -- to deal with the unfinished portions of the manuscript rather than the somewhat clunky concluding prose by Haynes and Jensen. But I also understand why those involved with McNamara's writing legacy wanted the text to appear in its current state. Recommended. 

Dark Places (2009) by Gillian Flynn

Dark Places (2009) by Gillian Flynn: Flynn gained fame and fortune and a bit of controversy with her third published novel, Gone Girl, and its movie adaptation which she scripted. Once a TV and film critic for Entertainment Weekly, Flynn's writing in this novel seems aimed at film adaptation, though none is as yet forthcoming.

Dark Places is a dark romp occasionally undercut by its glibness and by an ending that seems aimed at some sequel down the road. Its strengths are its strong though sometimes programmatic characterization, especially of its protagonist, Libby Day.

Day was the sole survivor at age seven of the 1985 massacre of her mother and two sisters in their small Midwestern town. Her 15-year-old brother went to jail for the murders, primarily because of Libby's coached, fictionalized testimony. 

24 years later, a bunch of wonky murder hobbyists who debate various solved and unsolved homicides online and at conventions pay Libby to appear at one such convention, where she discovers that the "Kill Club" believes that she lied on the stand and that her brother is innocent.

Libby may have lived a horrid life of depression and mania and seclusion, but the lure of money gets her out of the house. Initially that's because her inheritance is about $500 away from running out. So she negotiates various fees with the Kill Club in exchange for her visiting anyone and everyone who might know something about the murders that the police never investigated. The quest will ultimately involve meeting with her brother in jail after not talking to him in 24 years, as well as a meeting or two with her absent, alcoholic, deranged father.

Libby is a great character -- wounded, acerbic, cynical, self-lacerating, other-lacerating. The novel alternates her first-person, present-day narration with third-person chapters focused on brother Ben and their single mother, depressed and beaten down and poor and about to lose the family farm to the Bank.

Aside from that ending, Dark Places also has a problem more peculiar to Hollywood movies than novels: its mystery is compromised by the novelistic equivalent of a combination of Chekov's Gun and the 'Unmotivated', secretly Motivated Close-up that reveals the identity of the killer or the mole an hour before that character steps on stage (see: the cook in The Hunt For Red October). 

One seemingly random bit of conversation early in the novel reveals a major late-novel revelation. It screams for attention because there's no other similar information surrounding it. There might as well be a flashing neon sign pointing to it. 

The rest of the mystery seems to be telegraphed about halfway through the book by virtue of several Neon Moments of Fore-shadowing. Oh, well. I guessed the major plot revelation of Gone Girl before watching the movie without ever reading the novel. Flynn maybe needs to work on this. Or not. Certainly a lot of people like her stories just the way they are, ready to hit the screen and partially predigested when it comes to Twists.

In any case, Dark Places is a mostly fun, fast read. Its level of mystery will probably depend on just how many mysteries you've read and seen. Its narrative use of the 1980's Satanic Cult scares that put a lot of innocent people in jail doesn't quite work as commentary because there are actual Satanists in the novel, no matter how puerile. Though that's almost paid off by Libby's discovery that the Satanic teenager of 1985 becomes the feed-store operator of 2009. Recommended.

Horror Detectiveness with Jack Caffery

Skin (2009) (Jack Caffery #4) by Mo Hayder: Skin pretty much picks up where the previous DCI Jack Caffery novel ended, with the disappearance of a minor celebrity still unsolved and underwater recovery unit detective Flea Marley knowing way more about that disappearance than anyone at work knows. 

This thread will continue until the beginning of Wolf (Caffery#7), leading to a certain amount of acrimony and misunderstanding between Caffery and Marley. That the two are both great detectives with screwed-up personal lives makes them seemingly perfect for each other, but theirs is a slow-burn (or perhaps no-burn) relationship.

Mo Hayder mixes things up here with a couple of investigations and a serial killer who isn't exactly a serial killer. Caffery remains an engaging, anti-social, brooding character. Another plot thread from the previous Caffery/Marley novel continues here in unexpected ways with occasional supernatural undertones. And the titular case offers Hayder's near-patented blend of horror-procedural.

Caffery even gets trapped in an empty septic tank by the killer at one point. This never happened to Philip Marlowe! Recommended.

Wolf (2015) (Jack Caffery #7) by Mo Hayder: A plot thread that started way back in Caffery#3 (Ritual) finally ends in the opening pages of Wolf. And a plot thread that began in Mo Hayder's first Caffery novel will also approach its conclusion. 

Wolf is a clever procedural in which Caffery, operating alone, has to find hostages with only a partial note reading 'Please help us,' a dog with neither a microchip nor a helpful phone number on its collar-tag, and a wedding ring attached to that dog's collar.

The third-person narrative POV moves among Caffery, the hostages, and the hostage-takers. An old murder plays a part, as does Caffery's own unanswered grief about his brother who disappeared and was never found when Caffery was a boy. The oracular, often irritating Walking Man plays a part. So, too, that dog. Flea Marley doesn't appear, but she's in Caffery's thoughts.

We go into some unexpected places along the way, including a sort of closure for Caffery, and into the realm of corporate espionage and secret weapons development. All this and serial killers, Goths, and Caffery's endearing blend of misanthropy and overwhelming concern for the safety of others -- and for justice when that safety has been fatally breached. Highly recommended.

The Killer, the Architect, and the Assassin

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (2003): If this non-fiction book were fiction, it would seem ridiculously over-determined. As historical fact, it's ridiculously creepy and weird.

The 1893 Chicago World's Fair, dubbed the 1893 Columbian Exposition in honour of the 400th anniversary of Columbus arriving in the Americas, was also a hunting ground for one of history's most prolific serial killers AND a mentally disturbed would-be assassin with a fixation on Chicago's popular mayor. The fair itself was the greatest spectacle of modern history up to that point. Envisioned as a showcase for modern industry, architecture, and good old Chicago pluck by chief architect Daniel Burnham, the fair delivered against all odds.

"H.H. Holmes" is the Devil of the title. That's his preferred assumed name, not his birth name. He was a charismatic conman, pharmacist, businessman, doctor, and land speculator who came to Chicago in the late 1880's and discovered that he liked it there. The rapidly growing metropolis offered fertile ground for Holmes's endless grifting. It also offered a steady supply of anonymous young women who'd come to the big city to get jobs and found themselves the prey of this horribly prolific serial killer.

Holmes killed about 50 men, women, and children over a 5-year-period before getting tracked down and arrested by the freelance detectives of the Pinkerton Agency for insurance fraud in Philadelphia and subsequently revealed as a mass murderer. An awful lot of conclusions arise from his career. For one, policing was extremely crude in late 19th-century Chicago. Trained police detectives were few and far between not just in Chicago, but in America. And while several people suspected Holmes of being a serial murderer for years, they did nothing, in part because no one really believed the police were capable of catching anything other than a bribe. The relative anonymity created by an America in which transportation had outstripped communication also helped Holmes. So, too, did his charisma. Many of these women walked into the lion's den, leaving their husbands behind in a couple of cases, taking their own children to their attendant dooms.

And Holmes is more a premonition of Adolf Hitler than an echo of Jack the Ripper. He has henchmen, though none were ever brought to trial for the murders. He's eerily charismatic. He's committed to his version of an ideology, his grifting and speculation ultimately being Capitalism in its purest form. I'm surprised Ayn Rand didn't idolize him. He's the serial killer of the American Dream.

He's also immensely cowardly. He tends to kill with either gas or chloroform. And then he would make money from the bodies of the dead, selling four bodies he had reduced to skeletons to medical practitioners. Waste not, want not. Once captured, he spun out a series of partial truths, with the lies and facts changing each time. Thus, no final determination can ever exist of his murder total.

Meanwhile, the World's Fair came together to showcase Chicago to America and the world as a first-class city (this was, of course, New York's put-upon Second City). Daniel Burnham orchestrated the Fair, the White City of the title. The buildings were massive and imposing and painted white. The construction schedule was breakneck. The number of employees needed to make Opening Day a reality was enormous, and enormously beneficial during a period of world economic recession.

The politicking and negotiating and organizing that made the World's Fair a reality are a marvel themselves. Massive buildings went up in the time it now seems to take to fill a pothole. Things burned down or blew down or fell down and were rebuilt. Arguments over architectural style were had, most of them won by Burnham with his pseudo-classical, monumental perferences. People were stunned simply by the massive presence of the Fair. America's finest architects and engineers pitched in, including the legendary, crotchety landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of Central Park. The Fair became a monument to progress and to Chicago's emergence as a worthy civic rival to New York.

And the White City brought a flood of visitors who needed a hotel. And H.H. Holmes ran a hotel in a building he had designed with the aim of making murder easy and fun. For him, anyway.

Above it all rose the world's first Ferris Wheel, created by an engineer named Ferris (natch) and almost cyclopean in its scale: 270 feet high, with 36 giant cars capable of carrying several dozen people apiece. It was as if the first tall building had been the Empire State Building. And Burnham also had a hand in one of New York's most famous early skyscrapers, the distinctively nicknamed Flatiron Building.

Erik Larson -- who also wrote the excellent Isaac's Storm, about the hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas in 1900 -- does a fine job here of marshalling and orchestrating facts in an entertaining fashion. He makes a number of interesting connections and suppositions. And he makes engineering, planning, and architecture fascinating subjects while also situating the narrative in its historical context of the rise of unions, suffragettes, and an increasingly integrated global economy.

Larson does go somewhat over-the-top in a couple of sections in which he tries to imagine things for which there were no historical records. This tends to lead him to speculate on unknowables such as 'What was this person thinking?' It's a hallmark of the history written for popular consumption. Given the horror of what we know of Holmes' actions, these attempts to depict crimes which we don't know the details of seem like overkill. Nonetheless, despite those reservations, this is a splendidly readable history. Highly recommended.

The Last Voice They Hear (1998) by Ramsey Campbell

The Last Voice They Hear (1998) by Ramsey Campbell: Geoff and Gail Davenport are the proud parents of three-year-old Paul and co-workers on a British news show called The Goods, which exposes corruption and abuse at schools, workplaces and other venues. They live in London, England, though Gail is originally from San Francisco and Geoff from Liverpool. Gail's parents are about to visit.  

And Paul is about to get a phone call from someone he hasn't talked to in twenty years -- his estranged, older half-brother Ben, the product of terrible emotional and physical abuse from Ben's step-father (Geoff's father), Ben and Geoff's mother, and their grandparents.

And that phone call means the end to domestic bliss, as Campbell puts another happy family through Hell.

When they were children, Geoff tried to shield Ben from their parents' wrath whenever he could. But he was a kid, and he failed. A lot. And now Ben blames him as much or more for his woes than he does their late parents and late grandparents. But there's more. Over the last seven years, someone has been killing elderly couples in a particularly gruesome way, staging the bodies to make a comment about...something. 

Now Ben tells Geoff that he's the killer, and that Geoff has to play an even worse version of a bad childhood 'game' Ben cooked up in order to divine Ben's new identity, stop the killings -- and protect young Paul, in whom Ben is inordinately interested. And so we're off.

Ben's ability to operate freely, at least for awhile, is bought by threats against Geoff's wife and child -- terrible things are promised should Geoff bring the police into the loop -- but also by Geoff's own empathy and sense of guilt for Ben, empathy and guilt Ben has been using to emotionally leverage Geoff since childhood.

The novel doesn't waste much space hiding Ben's new identity from the reader. The Last Voice They Hear is a mystery about how people become the way they are, not who they are. Ben's treatment as a child and as a teenager is indeed awful -- but the mystery of why he blames Geoff more than anyone else informs much of the narrative.

Campbell deftly uses multiple third-person limited POVs to jump between first two and then three threads of the story to maintain suspense until shrinking the narrative back down at the end to one tense, focused final chase. Ben isn't sympathetic, but one feels pity for him throughout.

More importantly, while the novel shows Ben to be an extremely bright and competent killer, he's never shown to be a Lecter-style Superman. He has flaws, and his competence is ultimately as much a part of his psychic scarring as are his more pitiable traits. Geoff, as the nominal hero, may not be as interesting, but he's also flawed and almost fatally compromised by his desire to protect his family -- his entire family. It's his most decent, humane qualities that just might get everyone killed. Just as Ben wants it. Highly recommended.