From its rather gory-looking cover to the tagline "He knows what scares you to death", it's pretty clear the audience that Chris Carter's second novel (after The Crucifix Killer) is aimed at: We're in thriller territory and expecting a pretty high body count.
Originally published in 2010, The Executioner delivers precisely that. We open with a short vignette of an unnamed man being killed in what's implied to be a brutal manner, before being introduced to Carter's two policeman-heroes Robert Hunter and Carlos Garcia, who handle the more unusual homicide cases in Los Angeles. Hunter and Garcia have been called to a church, which has been the scene of a vicious - and, as quickly becomes apparent, different to the one we're first shown - murder of the priest. There are what look like ritual-murder aspects to it, and it's clear that the killer is a very twisted individual indeed.
As promised, things move at a pretty reasonable clip from there. Hunter and Garcia discover that the priest's murder bore an uncanny resemblance to the recurring nightmare he'd had of his own death. As they discover this, the killer strikes again, this time in an entirely different but no less sadistic manner.
Usefully, too, while there are a few glancing references to the events of the earlier novel, there's no need to know what Hunter and Garcia had experienced there in order to follow the plot here. This is handy, since I'd never heard of Carter prior to seeing this novel.
So far, so promising, particularly if gore and fast pacing are your things. That said, The Executioner really doesn't work half as well as it could have done in more assured hands.
The two central characters, Hunter and Garcia, are simply ciphers drawn from central casting. Hunter, somewhat implausibly, has encyclopedic knowledge on a wide range of subjects and keeps deploying this for maximum effect. It emerges that he has a PhD in criminal psychology, which is helpful, but on occasion he seems to require a lecture from Garcia to understand what's going on. These "As You Know, Bob" moments may be useful for the reader in breaking up a long monologue, but they completely remove any sense of realism in the characterisation.
Carter is also a victim of what might be termed "Dan Brown Syndrome" in his writing, the mistaken belief that the research he's done has to be included somewhere, otherwise it's meaningless. As a result, a scene involving some interesting deductive work is interrupted by a discursus on the fact that LA's Little Tokyo neighbourhood is one of only a few Japantowns in the USA. Similarly, the arrival at the scene of the second crime is interrupted by a pointless explanation of why a certan police department was handling the matter. If the major goal of a good thriller is to keep the pace moving relentlessly forward, Carter's inclusion of irrelevant background produces the opposite effect.
Other characters, particularly the police captain under whom the two detectives work, are also two-dimensional cutouts and there purely to impart important knowledge (or, in the captain's case, slam doors and shout at people). The main forensic pathologist even spends a page or so explaining how an autopsy works, which is a waste of everyone's time.
Secondly, Carter manages to deliver some important clues via the hackneyed device of the "psychic teenager". In this day and age, I'm increasingly certain that the only "unexplained psychic" characters really only belong in the more supernatural/detective genre, and even then with extreme caution. The arrival of this character also gives Hunter more of an opportunity to be a human Wikipedia, which is rather a shame.
This character is then involved in what turns out, near the end of the novel, to have been a subplot all along. The usefulness of the subplot is highly debatable, particularly since it seems only to provide Carter with the opportunity to kill (offstage, quietly, and for no apparent reason) a journalist character he'd created to annoy Hunter with. It's not a spoiler at all to indicate that this particular subplot involves someone killing prostitutes, which the journalist patently is not.
Lastly, after promising so much, the conclusion of the main plot-line is rather a damp squib. The only thing which convinces Hunter that they're not on the right track is a "hunch", rather than anything more concrete. Admittedly, after we've strayed into the realms of psychic teenagers, anything is going to be a bit of a guess.
There's even the "killer explains how it was all done" set piece. Well, there's the "Hunter tells the killer how it was all done, with the killer then re-telling things and providing more detail" set piece, which slows things down. Annoyingly, the explanation glosses over the way in which the killer established the priest's fear (the explanation given is roughly "I have money and can do almost anything I want", which is a complete cop-out). I also realise, re-reading one scene for this review, that the second murder in the novel would have been made practically impossible given the killer's explanation and identity.
As a final comment, proofreading doesn't appear to have been high on the list of priorities here, either. The priest's nightmares are "reocurring", rather than "recurring", which grates. Even worse, several characters (and the narrator) use "deducted" as the past tense of "deduce". As a result, Garcia at one point speaks to a woman "who had been crying, he deducted", as if he somehow removed points from her.
The bones of the plot here are good. Carter clearly had a good idea for why a series of murders could be committed. Unfortunately, the writing of the novel was several bridges too far for him, and it shows.
2 stars. Not recommended.
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