Casey Hill - "Taboo"

Hailing from Ireland, "Casey Hill" is another pseudonym for a husband and wife duo, this time Melissa and Kevin Hill. While Melissa Hill is a bestselling author in her own right, it seems that neither had written crime before 2011's Taboo.

On the face of it, Taboo has a lot going for it. It's set in Ireland, which is an area which contemporary crime fiction hasn't really travelled to on anything like the level it could do, it's a very of-the-moment Dublin in which the action takes place (property prices seem to be at just pre-GFC levels, people are constantly bemoaning gentrification), and the main character is Reilly Steel, a young female forensic scientist. The ingredients are there for a decent thriller.
We're introduced to the characters at a reasonable clip, too. Steel is an FBI forensic specialist who's been seconded to the Irish police (the "Guards", as the Irish term is translated to English by many characters) to help establish a modern forensic laboratory. She's Californian, young, blonde, and has an uncanny sense of smell and "instincts" that she deploys at a crime scene by doing what another character thinks is yoga. The other characters given decent air-time are detectives Delaney and Kennedy. Peculiarly, Delaney is often referred to in narration by his first name (Chris), while Kennedy isn't.
As the novel begins, Steel's team is investigating the evidence from a drunken fight in Temple Bar, which allows for a quick overview of what sorts of evidence a good technician can get from something as innocent as a hamburger. Slightly an instance of "as you know, Bob", but as an establishing shot, I'll let our authorial duo get away with it. There's an unidentified body floating in the Liffey, too, before everyone is called to what looks like a murder-suicide in an upmarket area of the city.

The plot moves rapidly from this point, as the bodycount piles up, and usually in inventively gruesome ways. The theme of the killings is that the victims have somehow been forced to break social taboos before being killed, and this leads into some interesting discussions of Freudian psychology in between our regularly-scheduled murder scenes.
In typical thriller manner, chapters are short, and often end with dramatic cliffhangers - characters suddenly have a dramatic realisation before we jump-cut to someone else. The final revelation, when it comes, is suitably dramatic, and there's a fair bit of running around and racing against time to try and deal with an increasingly twisted murderer.

That said, for all its promise, Taboo never really moves beyond the generic. Opportunities to really make the most of the Irish setting aren't taken advantage of (apart from an incredible, and ham-fisted, set of coincidences in the final few chapters), and in fact the only way we really know we're in the Emerald Isle is that most of the male characters talk about drinking alcohol a lot.
The characters, too, are cliched. Steel is strikingly beautiful, whip-smart and has Poirot-esque instincts that keep allowing her to see the evidence her colleagues miss. Delaney is practically hypnotised by her brilliance, and Kennedy's scepticism seems sufficiently strong that it could only ever mask a grudging respect for Steel's unorthodox methods. Even the killer, when we eventually meet them, is a rather bland, two-dimensional serial killer from central casting. This isn't quite a killer with no motive, but the motives ascribed feel like an attempt by the authors to tie up some rather awkward loose ends with a semi-decent outcome, regardless that it sounds more artificial than it should. Everyone seems to have read too much Freud, if I'm honest.
The pacing of the plot, too, is faulty. While the set-pieces where Steel and her colleagues realise the identity of the killer are dramatic, the twist of this character's identity is telegraphed several chapters earlier, and with very minimal attempts to conceal the clues.

Perhaps the biggest criticism I have for Taboo, though, is the lack of real gore. If you're going to write a novel about a genuinely twisted serial killer, particularly one who forces victims to do unspeakable things, simply hinting primly at the unspeakable things really doesn't work.
One of the taboos "broken" by the killer is hinted at for three chapters before someone finally expressly states what the victim was made to do. Another victim may not even really have been "forced to break a taboo" (homosexuality in this case), as none of the characters seem to agree on the facts regarding his death, while a third victim is only semi-described before Steel is informed that she's urgently needed for the climax of the novel.

I'm not saying that every single victim needs to be described in loving detail. What I am saying, though, is that you can't write a novel about violent crime - particularly not one where the blurb indicates that you created a pseudonym "to delve into darker aspects of fiction" - and suddenly come over all prim and proper the moment there's any risk that you might have to actually, you know, write about violent crime.
As a crime-fiction fan, I've read and enjoyed everything from Agatha Christie's politely murdered victims through to the cinematic violence of Stieg Larsson and the twisted motives of Mark Billingham's characters. While I recognise that true-crime, particularly that of serial killers, isn't everyone's cup of tea, I'm happy to call myself a ripperologist into the bargain. Surely, by now, we can all be adult enough to pick up a book about a violent serial killer and expect to encounter the same without being disappointed.

It appears, particularly from the final scenes of this novel, that Reilly Steel is intended to be a series character. If so, she can solve future crimes without me.

1 star.