Hangman

Book Review - Mystery, Crime, and the Most Repulsive Protagonist in Literature.

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-mystery-crime-and-the-most-repulsive-protagonist-in-literature-2c1d2fbcaad5

Hangman by Jack Heath

This book tells serial killer/crime-fighter Dexter, “Hold my beer.”

This book introduces us to Timothy Blake. On one level, Blake seems like a decent guy. The FBI calls on him to find kidnapped children. He seems to be very observant and very smart. He puts together bits of information to make clever deductions, leading him to the missing children.

On another level, Blake is sketchy. We soon learn that he doesn't get paid for his consulting work. His income consists of identity fraud and solving puzzles. He lives with a drug dealer. He was in a group home as an orphaned child. His parents were killed when he was a baby.

Then, on a completely different level, we learn - and this isn't a spoiler since it is presented early in the book and described in the Amazon blurbs - that the deal Blake has cut with the local FBI head is that when he rescues a child, he gets a death row inmate to eat.

Surprise! (Or not.) Because of trauma when he was a baby, Blake is a cannibal.

The author, Jack Heath, set out to write a truly awful character and he has. However, as with Dexter, Heath loads the dice to make us sympathetic. Blake knows he's a monster. He has a sense of ethics, such as not allowing his roommate to rape a girl. He has been handed a bad start in life. The people he eats are dangerous scum, etc.

Blake is a “Marty Stu” character. He's too smart - he memorizes credit card numbers at a glance. He shares a house with a roommate and eats victims raw, but he has a way of disposing of bodies that raises no questions about him. He's aware of his pathology but develops habits to control it.

In other words, Blake is a fantasy character in a fantasy world.

Nonetheless, apart from his unfortunate culinary choices, Blake is a sympathetic character, probably because he's not a real person at all. Likewise, the mystery moves along on its invention, artifice, and coincidences. The ending is surprising enough, but, again, it is coincidence and artifice, and many “don't think too hard about this” connections.

I enjoyed the story but didn't like the fact that I enjoyed the story.

Am I going to read any of the sequels? I don't know. This book is a page-turner. Heath can rock a story. Life is short, though, and I'm not sure I want to squander my rapidly evaporating reading life expectancy by being provoked into concern for someone who eats other people raw.

Your tastes, though, may differ.