Author: John Katzenbach
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Rating: WARTY!
This is the first Katzenbach that I've ever read, so I have nothing to go on but what's before me; that's the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it! But will it be Katzenbach Falls or The Adventure of the Red Circle Down the Drain?"? Well, I had mixed feelings about this one right up to the end. It wasn't until I started editing the final version of this review that I realized that this novel did not have what it takes to be a worthy read. It wasn't atrocious: parts of it were inventive and well-written, but it wasn't worthy, either. There was just too much wrong with it.
This novel centers around a serial killer (and novelist!) coming out of retirement. How that works exactly, remains unexplained! I can see a novelist doing this, but isn't 'Serial Killer' a lifelong profession? A serial killer may be retired (in an active sense) but not through any action of his own. But this man links his killings to successful novels that he writes based upon those murders, so when he started fading from public acclaim, why did he not pull his Red Riding Hood murders out of his hat then? Why wait until now? We're given no explanation.
This man is also old for a serial killer - in his sixties - and he's married, which is rare for a serial killer. You would think that this addition of a wife would add a real twist to the story, adding complexity and a certain element of randomness, and jacking up the tension, but right when it appears to be tightening tension, it suddenly goes nowhere. The killer feels that he doesn’t have much time left because his parents died in their sixties and he expects the same fate, so he wants to commit one last murder (or rather, series of murders) and write one last novel about it, and make this all worthy of The Guinness Book of World Records.
The three victims he chooses are all redheads (hence the title, Red 1-2-3), but other than that and the fact that they're all female, they seem to have nothing at all in common. At first. Sarah Locksley (Red two) used to be a school teacher until her husband and three-year-old daughter died in a car accident. From that point on, she gave up on life. Jordan Ellis (Red three) is a 4th year college prep school student who plays basketball with a vengeance. Her parents are having a contentious divorce, leaving her in the middle, and paradoxically feeling very much alone and doing poorly in school. Karen Jayson (Red one) is a doctor of geriatrics, and an amateur comedian. It turns out that the killer's wife is a patient of hers, and she's also the principle's secretary at Jordan's school. Other than those two facts, we're given nothing to link them together. It's never revealed how the killer chose his victims or what links they had (in his mind), and since no detective is ever on this case I guess it doesn't matter, but it felt really odd.
The killer-to-be has been stalking these three women for many months and continues to stalk them. He sends "introductory" letters signed "Big Bad Wolf" to each of them. We never learn the killer's name. He's always the wolf. His wife is referred to as Mrs Big Bad Wolf throughout. We're not even allowed to read those letters, so this is yet another in a list of things I simply didn't get about this novel. Each woman gets her letter on the same day, but only one of them calls police. The detective is a complete jerk and offers no help. He doesn’t even want to see the letter. This initial lack of interest is used as a really poor excuse for the women never to go to the police again, even when they have some good solid evidence that their plight is real. I found this approach to be completely unrealistic. More on this anon.
I almost gave up on this novel in the first couple of pages because Katzenbach writes like Stephen King, and trust me, that's not a compliment when it comes from my keyboard. Katzenbach's philosophy quite evidently, is "Why write a word when you can make it into a sentence? Why write a paragraph when a page would be far better, and why write a description of anything at all unless you’re fully prepared to occupy several pages with it?" Seriously, it’s tedious to read this prose. For example, he has one recipient of the letter determined to arm herself. So far, so good. There is a gun in the house in a locked box, and Katzenbach has her go get it, but he manages to fill four whole pages with this action alone! It’s t-e-d-i-o-u-s. Naturally I've started skipping page after page of his text in search of interesting bits - of which there are, to be fair, quite a few, but curiously, very few of these involve the killer himself. I tended to skip most of the parts which were written from his perspective. It was boring. After the opening few chapters his writing seemed to improve somewhat (or maybe I grew more immune to it). The parts about the women, including the killer's wife, were much more readable than any other parts.
Note to authors: I don’t care if you've compiled an extensive biography for every last, even remotely tangential character in your entire novel. I certainly don’t want to read it. I came for the story, not for a life history of the world's population! If it doesn’t move the story forward, if it doesn't tell me something interesting, useful, or important about your character, or clue me in about events, then who cares? Really? Who cares? I don’t mind a stray snippet here and there drifting into the story even if it isn't relevant. I don’t mind that at all, but when the action is routinely hijacked by authorial pontificating or verbosity, I'm taking a cab to the next good bit, and if you keep hitting on me inappropriately like that, I'm outta there.
The first time I felt completely comfortable with this novel and actually really enjoyed the reading was when we got to experience a basketball game in which Jordan is playing. Now this was prose. It was wonderful. But this was not until chapter five, after more than forty pages had gone by! This novel should have started right there and then! It should have been told from one person's, perhaps Jordan's, perspective to begin with, allowing her to find out that she was not alone after a few more chapters had gone by. That would have been a better novel. I found myself hop-scotching over the fat of verbosity to get to the lean meat. Any way, the killer sends another letter to each girl, directing them to a You Tube video (none of which actually exist on You Tube - a mistake IMO) which shows a bit of forest (playing on the Little Red Riding Hood theme), then a long-distance shot of the intended victim. Sarah's video cruelly shows a brief shot of the graves of her husband and daughter before it abruptly ends.
Is this a mistake by the BBW? The killer listed the videos for all three women in each letter, so that they now have the knowledge that they're not alone. Perhaps he fully intended them to meet up, so he can herd them together and kill them all at the same time, flushing them like fish into a barrel before taking them out, so to speak? Jordan takes the bull shark by the horns here, and quickly comes up with a system by which they can contact each other without giving away too much about themselves. The problem with this linking of the victims is that it makes no sense from the killer's PoV, nor does it really go anywhere. For the longest time, even after they get in touch, the three women all act independently. Their introduction doesn't seem to benefit them, and it doesn't seem to make much difference to the novel! It's only towards the end that they act in concert and then Katzenbach pretty much blows that, too.
Even when they have this 'support group', the BBW still dominates their every thought and even their behavior. Jordan, the aggressive basketball player and the most belligerent of the three when they're discussing action, is the first to encounter him in person and know it, yet instead of confronting him she shrivels to jelly and runs! Maybe that was smart, maybe it wasn't. Some serial killers would react aggressively, others would run themselves if confronted. Some might use charm to try and mislead a person into thinking their apparent stalking or threatening behavior was perfectly innocent. But Jordan gives the killer exactly the thrill he seeks, and worse, she fails to use this opportunity to tail him to his car, for example, and get a license plate number, yet she's the very one who is most vociferous in advocating that they should be pro-active in dealing with this! I really didn't appreciate this scene because it isn't like Jordan had not been expecting something like this for some time. For her to go to pieces like that was a bit of a let-down! Yes, perhaps it is what we all would have done, but this is fiction, and I expected more, given what we've been led to believe about Jordan's personality.
What continued to bother me throughout this novel was that these women consistently fail to involve the police. After Karen's initial call, it's never brought up again, like it's still a pointless option, but the fact is there is now three of them, not just one who has had a concrete threat. They have two letters each, and the three videos. This has gone well beyond a prank, or a mistake, or a misunderstanding: they have real cause for concern. They just don't have a suspect, but that's the very job of the detectives, and the inaction of these three women is inexcusable and downright stupid. In addition to that, I find it really hard to believe that not a one of them would advocate or seek police involvement. It's really an insult to women and threatens suspension of disbelief. Yes, one of these three is so cowed by life that she probably would not call a cop, but the other two have been presented to us as quite the opposite of that type of person. Katzenbach has failed to honor the very parameters of the novel he wants us to buy into here.
In the end, the women do act, and in concert, but their action isn't realistic or satisfactory to me. In some ways the ending worked, but I was expecting much more than this, and I felt robbed that justice wasn't served more neatly than what we got.
