UNKNOWN VENGEANCE

Two Buffalo Police Department detectives race to find what connects a serial killer’s victims in this novel.

Detective Rhody Richardson has the best case closing rate in his department’s history, but a spate of murders involving members of the medical community is putting his vaunted “ultra-high powers of perception” to the ultimate test. The killer, with a Patrick Bateman–like meticulousness, submits his victims to unspeakable tortures and leaves them with a number tattooed on their bodies. He places poems at each crime scene that count down the victims (“Revenge has taken four, with six to go”). Richardson and his partner, Jon Wayne (“Like the actor?” “Yeah. But spelled differently”), are aided by psychiatrist Dr. Kaileen Taylor, who is troubled by her new patient, Paul Schon. Schon is disturbingly still devastated by the loss of his cherished college sweetheart, who succumbed tragically to an infection. In Schon, Taylor detects “an underlying rage and resentment” that continue to build. The detectives also receive unexpected and invaluable assistance from Connor Patrick, a young “numbers guy” whose geeky expertise makes him a target of ridicule by department members. But appearances are deceiving. O’Brien has crafted a mostly potent procedural that opens the door to a series. The tale features characters who have an earned authority and integrity. The killer is tipped early, which moves the book’s focus from whodunit to how Richardson and his team will connect the dots. The author effectively makes a distinction between actual detective grunt work and “the sorta shit someone in Hollywood dreams up,” but he cannot resist giving Richardson his Clint Eastwood moment when he confronts a drug-addled restaurant robber. The flowers, cards, and stuffed animals surrounding one victim’s makeshift memorial are a keen-eyed detail. The opening murder is more uncomfortably graphic than the subsequent homicides, a successful technique by which readers’ imaginations can summon up worse horrors than O’Brien could relate in foreshadowed killings (“Dr. Saran Nadeer, a dentist who would not have a nice smile for long”). But in one regard, the author is an unreliable narrator when the killer tells a corpse: “This is nothing personal.” This case is revealed to be nothing but personal.

This gripping serial killer thriller with series potential is a cut above.