Bingo: Craft. The killer sees his murders as his carefully honed craft.
I have no one to blame but myself. After a relatively scathing review of Jennifer Hillier’s Jar of Hearts, I claimed that was it for thrillers for a while. So what did I do? That’s right, purchased another of Jennifer Hillier’s books, The Butcher. And it was worse than the first one.
This book is not about discovering who the serial killer the Butcher is. We find out right away: it’s retired chief of police Edward Shank. As far as the public is concerned, Shank shot the Butcher to death in a standoff years ago. Only the suspect, Rufus Wedge, was set up by Shank to take the fall. In the present day, Shank is quietly living in a senior home, but the murders have started up again. Will he get caught? Will he kill again? What will happen when his grandson Matthew discovers a box buried in the yard of the house he was gifted by Shank and figures out from the jarred collection of preserved hands that his grandfather is a killer?
I know this might seem silly to complain about a thriller, but Shank is truly disturbing. Nauseatingly so. From his casual brutality to his sexual sadism as he tortures young girls to his swerve into incest, it doesn’t get much grosser. It’s not so much the character himself, who is necessarily grotesque as any serial killer would be, but there’s something so uncomfortable about the writing. If this book was written by a man, I’d pinpoint it as misogynistic torture porn, but it was harder to think that about a woman writer. And yet it really was no different. There’s a creepy authorial excitement over the worst details that is really off-putting.
Matthew is dating Samantha (Sam), who is a true crime writer writing about the Butcher. Matthew is angry and violent, little better than his grandfather though I suppose there is some redemption at the end. Even so, before you know it he’s killed a good friend by angrily punching him in the face and the friend slams his head into the ground. Matthew’s reaction? “The last time he’d felt anything remotely this upsetting was when the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl to the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2006.” He similarly underreacts when he finds his grandfather’s souvenir hands and realizes he is the Butcher. All this murder and death is cause to be tormented emotionally you say? Instead: “So okay, Matt wasn’t sleeping well, but it had been a stressful time all around, and you know what? That was life.” Murder and mayhem: it is what it is.
The book follows Sam as she works to uncover who the Butcher is, juxtaposed against Shank’s continuing brutality. The reader waits for the collision course, including Matt’s own crime. The ending is not suspenseful and when I was done with the book, I remonstrated myself for willingly tackling this woman’s writing again. Like Jar of Hearts, this was an ugly book with no redeeming features. The “why” of Shank’s actions was also ludicrous.
As an aside, I couldn’t believe Hillier’s racist description of a doorman: “His face was almost as dark as his uniform, and he smiled at her, his glimmering white teeth sparkling under the bright halogen lights of the lobby.” What the artisanal fuck?!?!
