Today I’m joining the blog tour for The Genius Killer. My review is written with thanks to Zoe O’Farrell for inviting me on the tour and to the author for my copy of the audiobook.

Blurb:

The dark heart of a brilliant and ruthless psychopath

A celebrated but haunted detective

A determined young reporter hunting for justice – and the big story

Karl Jackson is a particularly vengeful sociopath with his unique way of ‘problem-solving’. DCI Tex Deacon suffers from the trauma of his beloved wife’s death and finds it immensely difficult to come to terms with it. As a Detective Chief Inspector specialising in murder and killer profiling, Tex has a relentless workload from his base on the edges of the mountains of the Lake District.

Tex is under pressure from his superiors to take a step back to grieve properly. It’s clear that Susan’s death has ripped out part of his soul. There is no doubt that Tex is suffering, but this DCI is a driven man. Tex’s welfare is the responsibility of his boss Chief Constable Barbara Bracewell, and she and Tex go back a very long way. However, Bracewell must do what is right for Tex and the Cumbrian police force.

Despite falling into a mental abyss, Tex’s instincts for the hunt never leave him. A hyper-intelligent and devious murderer appears in his crosshairs – the self-styled ‘Genius Killer’. So what will Tex do? What can he get away with doing with the Chief Constable monitoring his every move?

And then there’s Debbie Pilkington, a tenacious and hugely ambitious cub reporter at the local paper – The Rimpton Chronicle. Debbie has big stories and a big future in her own sights. A young journalist, a craggy and vastly experienced detective, and one of the most dangerous serial killers Britain has even seen. Their lives were about to intertwine. The chase to stop a cunning killer begins. Tex is a master at breaking down the thinking processes of those he hunts but with Tex enduring his own psychological meltdown, can he penetrate the mind of this supremely malevolent psychopath?

Review:

There are a lot of crime books on the market, so it must be difficult to find a concept that is unique. Mark Robson has done this successfully: we know who the killer is from very early on and the story is focused on whether they will be caught rather than who did it. There are also several sections told from the viewpoint of the killer and this gives us real insight into their personality and it was really interesting for me to learn from their research! He really made my skin crawl at times!

The detective who is determined to catch the killer is DCI Theo “Tex” Deacon. He’s actually only supposed to be carrying out light duties, but where’s the fun in that? I loved his approach – thinking outside the box and, more often than not, going against instructions and this made the novel a really engaging cat and mouse race. I understand that The Genius Killer is the first book in an intended series, and there is a lot about Deacon’s character that I would like to see carried forward. He has lots of unresolved issues from his past and his relationship with the journalist, Debbie Pilkington is an interesting one and I’d like to see how that develops.

I listened to the audiobook version of The Genius Killer and the narrator does a good job of building the tense moments in the novel and keeping the reader intrigued. Each different character speaks with a different regional accent, and whilst I understand that this was done to help distinguish between characters, this was a little distracting!

Overall, I enjoyed The Genius Killer and I will look out for future work by this author.

The Genius Killer is available from Amazon.

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