Hangman: A Novel
Readers will recognize this opening scene: a vicious killer is being transported to a ­maximum-security prison. The driver stops the van on a lonely stretch of road, frog-marches the killer to cliff’s edge in one last attempt to learn the location of a victim’s grave. What happens next, though, is not exactly what we’re expecting. Talty’s sullen novel is like that, deploying conventional situations and then upending them. Buffalo homicide detective Abbie Kearney is called in to hunt the psycho, and she meets an almost-but-not-quite-­standard cast: the police chief under pressure, the prison psychiatrist with a revealing file, the reluctant partner, and a boozy old cop with access to a shadowy world distressingly close to the killer’s. Fights, chases. Time spent in the mind of the killer—happily, very little time because Talty knows that madness is dull—then an irrelevant observation about an irrelevant detail that busts the whole case open. Finally we learn what really happened at that cliff’s edge, and the author brings this grim tale to a grim and satisfying conclusion. Stick with this one; it delivers. --Don Crinklaw