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Vicious / Kevin O'Brien

Pinnacle / June 2010
Reviewed by: Rick R. Reed

Synopsis: For more than two years, he held Seattle in a terror grip - a cold-blooded killer who abducted young mothers right in front of their sons and murdered them execution style. Then, as suddenly as the killings began, they seemed to stop.

Susan Blanchette is looking forward to a relaxing weekend getaway with her fiancée, Allen, and young son, Matthew. But something about the remote lake house doesn't feel right. A woman vanished from the area a year ago, and now Susan thinks she's spotted someone lurking around the property. And when Allen disappears, her fear grows.

A psychopath has returned, ready to strike again. Someone who can't resist the urge to kill, who derives pleasure from others' pain, and who is drawing nearer to Susan as each minute of the weekend ticks by. But she's just one pawn at the heart of a killer's deadly game — a killer who is unrelenting, unstoppable, and absolutely vicious.

Review: Although it’s being marketed as a thriller, Kevin O’Brien’s latest Seattle-set chiller would be more appropriately classified as a horror novel. It’s in the same true-life vein as, say, a horror novel by Jack Ketchum or a movie like Last House on the Left or The Strangers. It’s the scariest kind of horror, because it could really happen.

I say the above because Vicious is a book that defies convention as a thriller in the same vein as Harlan Coben or Lynwood Barclay. Vicious, unlike most books in the thriller genre, is all about the villain (or villains) and the victims. O’Brien spends very little time on police procedure or even amateur investigators getting to the bottom of crime. Most books classified as thrillers make the detection of the principle crime the heart of the work. Vicious brings us brilliantly into the mind of a very sick and twisted killer – dubbed by the press as the “Mama’s boy Killer” because he kills only the mothers of young children – and his victims.

O’Brien is a master at ratcheting up the suspense and doing the thing that all suspense writers long to do: keep us compulsively turning the pages in an almost frantic quest to find out what happens next. Part of the reason for the escalating tension and mounting suspense is not only the author’s careful plotting and timing, but his facility for creating a truly sympathetic cast of characters. He makes his good characters so real and believable that we become not only observers, but protectors, watching over their every move and trying with force of telepathy to warn them about the peril they are placing themselves in. That’s masterful suspense.

Even with O’Brien’s less savory – and yes, evil – characters, there is a strong element of if not sympathy, then fascination. O’Brien brings us close enough to the fiery heart of evil to get scorched. He capably and credibly shows us the malice lurking in the twisted mind of a killer. And best of all, he allows us to understand the twisted and tortured logic of one who kills.

He sets all this down in territory I’m very familiar with — Seattle and the more untamed parts of the Pacific Northwest that border the “rain city.” I would say that even if you have never been to this part of the country, O’Brien makes it very real and palpable. The woods, the darkness, the snap and chill of the air, and the often gloomy landscape provide a very compelling and evocative backdrop for the author’s tale. The real-life locations, such as Seattle’s beautiful Volunteer Park, make the horror that much more believable and real.

This is the first of this author’s work that I’ve encountered. I have already followed that up with his also excellent Final Breath, and I am so impressed with his ability to tell a dread-inducing tale (however you want to classify it) that I am certain I will complete his entire oeuvre by year’s end.

Purchase Vicious by Kevin O’ Brien.

Columnist Rick R. Reed is the author of thirteen novels, three collections, and has short fiction in more than twenty anthologies. He lives in Seattle, WA. Find out more about the author at his official website.

Posted on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 08:37AM by Registered CommenterDark Scribe Magazine in | Comments68 Comments | References1 Reference

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