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JIGSAW MAN
by Elena Forbes
Spiderline/House of Anansi Press, April 2015
385 pages
$19.95 CAD
ISBN: 1487000235


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Mark Tartaglia, a Detective Inspector in London, is called back to the very London hotel where he had just enjoyed a one-night stand with a woman he'd picked up in the bar. At the hotel, he finds the body of a woman he knows. She is Sam (Samantha) Donovan's sister. Sam is Mark's former colleague and close friend, who has left the force following her near-fatal encounter with a serial killer, recounted in the previous volume. For reasons not altogether clear, Sam takes up residence (separate rooms) at Mark's while the forensics team go over the house she shared with her sister.

As a result of his close involvement with this case, Mark is reassigned to another, equally baffling, murder. The body of what is first thought to be that of a homeless man is found in the ruins of a burnt-out car. But it soon develops that this is not a single body, but a patched-together corpse constructed from the body parts of four different people. A serial killer at work? So it would appear.

JIGSAW MAN is the fourth in the Tartaglia/Donovan series. I must confess at the outset that this is a series I am encountering for the first time, which may have had an effect on my response to the book. I do feel that every novel should be asked to stand on its own two feet, even if it is true that one of the pleasures of series reading for many is the ongoing relationship they develop with the continuing characters. Will the marriage survive? Will the dog die? That sort of thing. Still, readers can hardly be expected to hold off reading a new book until they've read everything in the series that's come before it (that's no way to grow an audience), so it seems legitimate to look at a particular entry in a series as though it had neither past history nor intriguing future.

First out of the box, JIGSAW MAN is a very solid, very competently written police procedural. As experienced readers of the sub-genre will be the first to admit, actual police procedure is a slog, involving door-knocking, interviewing, a lot of face time with computers, and the occasional bit of luck. By and large, it involves little in the way of suspense, at least not until the case goes to court. Fictional police procedurals march to a different rhythm. The personal and professional lives of the protagonists are featured, a direct relationship of one sort or another between cop and killer is frequently involved, and the narrative arc increases in tension as the story develops, often culminating in a suspense-filled threat to the policeman or his nearest and dearest.

JIGSAW MAN does not work quite this way. The slog is there all right as the painstaking investigation is carefully detailed. But there is a peculiarly detached quality to both the recounting of the events and to the characters themselves that makes it difficult for the reader to care quite as much about the outcome as she ought. This sense of removal also leeches the story of some considerable suspense. In the end, we are left with an oddly speculative explanation of why the killer chose his bizarre course, one that is less than compelling. Tartaglia's initial appearance, waking up with unclear memories of considerable liquor and a one-night stand, turns out to have nothing whatever to have with the story and is never mentioned again. Likewise, a murder takes place very late in the book and the victim is someone about whom the reader ought to care; it simply disappears as the two main cases Tartaglia has been following are retrospectively wrapped up.

Elena Forbes does write good, solid prose and the evidence of reviews of earlier books in this series suggests that she is capable of inventing interesting characters. Readers might therefore be advised to begin at the beginning of the series. I certainly regret that I didn't.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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