In Nick Pirog’s Unforeseen, Thomas Prescott is an FBI irregular hunting down a serial killer, again. This novel is the sequel to another that doesn’t exist, in which the hero successful brings down a serial killer who turns out to have that classic lazy–plotter’s get–out–of–free card, an identical twin. I’ll give the author his sarcasm on that.
The book has some good points, but one of them is not the plot, which is, or its absence is, the worst I’ve read in a long time. The serial killer seems to be able to follow the hero, explore and know his life almost better than the hero himself, and strike at the heart of the killer’s life. Yet the hero is powerless and clueless, his FBI colleagues are powerless and clueless, and it doesn’t seem to occur to any of those fancy investigative super–heroes to actually try and work out how the killer knows all these things, how the killer follows the hero. The plot has more holes than an Emmental factory.
The people aren’t real. For example, the serial killer targets women. The women in the book gather together, fair enough, but beyond that have no reaction to the events, and continue their life as normal. Normally, when people are targetted by a serial killer, they tend to get, you know, scared, frightened, fucking terrified. Not the women in this book. They’re just not real. Their characterisation is absent.
Then there’s the fact that these supposédly superintelligent wonder–agent feds behave like students who’ve just dicsovered beer. If the book was about students who’ve just discovered beer, that’d be fair enough. But it’s about law enforcement agents supposédly hunting down a serial killer, and their behaviour would only make sense if serial killers lived at the bottom of bottles. I’m sorry, but to call this book shite is to insult the byproducts of scoffing.
The book’s thoroughly American, and, if you like the American gestalt, that part’s good. I dislike the American love of excess, found here, but that’s my fault, not the novel’s.
The recital, by Johnny Heller, is thoroughly up to snuff (© bad taste, inc.).
I will say the novel has a decent sense of humour, with the author using it effectively to make the hero human.
But the dreadful plot ruins it. I bought a batch of the first four Prescott books for the price of one. This is the first one. It doesn’t work for me. I gave up before the reveal. I won’t be listening to the others.