Just look at that cover. It reminds me so much of the late 1980s and early 1990s Stephen King novels, which completely permeated and populated my house growing up. When I was kid, growing up in Roanoke, VA, I watched an episode of The X-Files that was heavily promoted by local tv stations and the newspaper as “Taking place in Roanoke,” so I watched. It’s a pretty good episode actually and is the one where Bruce Campbell stars as Maybe The Devil?. But! It doesn’t take place in “Roanoke, VA” it’s filmed in LA or Vancouver and looks nothing like my town, and worse: they called the town after the postal code instead of what we called it and it was “Hollins, VA.” Sad day.
I had some similar feelings with this novel. It’s about Richmond! Hey, I live in Richmond! It’s about the SOUTHSIDE STRANGLER! Whoa! That happened in my old neighborhood. Oh…..oh! This looks and feels NOTHING like Richmond. Why does that guy have a New York accent? Why is every Black character talking like they rolled straight out of Gone With the Wind.
But, like the The X-Files episode, it’s not a bad mystery at all. It’s very clearly a late 80s/early 90s book and everything is about this new fangled thing called “Dee Inn Aay” (I know you would say Enn, but this is the South). So there’s lots of probably accurate, but definitely goofy gadgets being used. There’s the kinds fiber and hair analysis that has been proven to be more or less BS, and of course there’s lots of smoking. This book has all the same issues as many other books like it, and all the good things of other books like it. The writing itself, is not…rich exactly, but it’s perfectly competent and full.
That said, the book definitely has its issues. This book may be directly responsible for my mom being absolutely terrified of Richmond when I was a kid. I live here now, and she visits regularly, and did when other family lived here in the last ten or so years, but there’s been a significant shift in the reputation of Richmond as a city. It’s still a city with a more or less even split Black/White population with a growing Latinx population as well. The murder total per year has dramatically dropped while the city has grown having a hugely positive effect on the murder rate. We even have a ton of breweries. But it’s still a city defined by being a hotbed of segregation and Jim Crow policy. It’s THE city for Confederate Monuments, and like a lot of Southern cities, it’s always had a vibrant Black arts, business, and politics community that has been targeted repeatedly over the decades for eradication in direct and indirect ways. And it has a hugely problematic and segregated school system. There’s a tone in this novel that this is about the murder of white women, and when there is a Black victim, she’s treated like an aberration to the aberration. Black women don’t get killed by serial killers, the books suggests; they die as a course of their lives. So while the forensic science in the book works to a certain degree, I am supposed to rooting for a broken police and court system that terrorizes the Black population of my city, and sneer at journalists and defense attorneys, who are the last lines of defense against targeted state violence. This book and no book about violence in the city of Richmond should be written by a white author who refuses to put the work in. In addition the novel, for NO REASON WHATSOEVER, decides to put a gay character, but not even for certain gay, but slightly effeminate, in in order for the narrator to think: wow, I am a little ashamed of myself, but had I known he was gay, I wouldn’t have hired him. Why? Because even though he’s normal (except being gay and all) I have seen the truly reprehensible things gay men sometimes do, so you get it, right? It doesn’t serve any purpose other than to make me dislike her and suggest that gay people are responsible for the hesitancy to accept them in the fold of “normal life”.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6534.Postmortem)