Review: Unsub

Unsub by Meg Gardiner
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.

You know a book is in trouble when it’s about a crazy maniac slaughtering people left and right, but you find yourself yawning a lot while reading it.

Back in the 1990s a brutal serial killer known as the Prophet terrorized the San Francisco area, and Detective Mack Hendrix was unable to catch him. Hendrix’s obsession with the case eventually destroyed his career and his family, but his daughter, Caitlin, has grown up to be a cop despite seeing what happened to him. Now the Prophet is back again, and Caitlin is on the team trying to find him despite Mack’s warning that she should stay away from the whole mess.

Familiar is the word that best described this book for me because almost every aspect of it seems drawn from other works. The whole thing about detectives having to think like a madman to catch one at the risk of their own sanity is straight out of Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon. A young lady detective driven by the tragic fate of her cop father to track down a terrifying bad guy is from that other Harris novel Silence of the Lambs which also got turned into a movie you may have heard of. The elaborate ritualistic killings as punishment are pure John Doe in the film Seven including both bad guys having the same source of inspiration. David Fincher comes up again because he also directed the excellent Zodiac based on the real unsolved case, and that was obviously another big element with a killer who terrorized the Bay Area and loved the limelight. (To be fair, the book was drawing from actual events so similarities between this and Fincher’s movie may just be from them both using the same true crime case, but it still seems like the film was a huge influence on it.)

A serial killer story is almost inevitably going to incorporate some tropes just as any other genre work will so it’s not a cardinal sin if you’re reminded of something else while reading one, but unfortunately that’s all this book did for me. It never seemed to have anything new or original to say, and the clichés piled up fast. [When it was revealed that the Prophet was a hacker I sighed and said aloud, “Well, of course he is.” About the only thing I didn’t predict correctly while reading is that the dog didn’t get killed for once. Thank goodness for small favors. (hide spoiler)]

It’s all stuff we’ve read and seen in the works I cited before as well as countless others, and what it boils down to is that it’s just another bland lead character with a troubled past trying to track down a murderous Insane McGenius who is constantly a step ahead of the cops and whose intricate schemes that depend on perfect timing almost always play out exactly as planned. I was also supremely angered by the ending which employs one of my least favorite plot twists. [”OMG!! The Prophet was working with someone else! There’s still a second killer out there! Who could have seen that coming?!?” Ugh. (hide spoiler)]

It’s disappointing because I’ve heard good things about Meg Gardiner, and I had high hopes for this. The writing is decent enough to keep it from being complete trash, but it’s just a generic serial killer thriller that runs over the same old worn ground. Most of her effort seemed to have been centered on coming with all kinds of gruesomely elaborate ways to murder someone, but again, Seven did it first and better.

I'm not surprised to see that it’s been bought by CBS as the basis for a potential TV series because it seems exactly like what their brand is built on in the form of a procedural crime story we’ve all seen a thousand times before.

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