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A review by jacki_f
Dead Man Running by Steve Hamilton
4.0
Steve Hamilton has written 10 books about Alex McKnight, a former police officer and one time baseball pitcher, who has retired to Paradise (a tiny town in upper Michigan). Over the course of the series he has worked on and off as a Private Investigator and when this book opens he's working as a bounty hunter. However he's about to get drawn into a man hunt, because in Arizona the FBI are on the trail of a serial killer who has been apprehended but says that he will only talk to Alex McKnight.
I feel extremely ambivalent about this book - it's a very good thriller but it is evolving a series that I love into something that I'm not so sure about. It's highly readable - it draws you in immediately in a way that's very cinematic and it keeps up the tension and pace throughout. But a lot of the charm of this series has been the wry humour, the strong sense of place and the very real characters and those things are almost entirely lost. The ending suggests that there will be another Alex McKnight book at some stage - hooray - but also that this book sets the tone for the next and presumably any that are to follow.
It has always perplexed me that this series hasn't attracted more attention and love and I presume that this is a move to make it more commercial. And this is a good thriller - albeit more unpleasant than I like (there's too much detail about how people get murdered in various nasty ways). But it's not really Alex McKnight #11, it's more Alex McKnight 2.0 #1, and I feel sad about that. If you are also in mourning for the series that was, I point you in the direction of Paul Doiron's Mike Bowditch series, which has a similar feel to it (although without the humour).
I feel extremely ambivalent about this book - it's a very good thriller but it is evolving a series that I love into something that I'm not so sure about. It's highly readable - it draws you in immediately in a way that's very cinematic and it keeps up the tension and pace throughout. But a lot of the charm of this series has been the wry humour, the strong sense of place and the very real characters and those things are almost entirely lost. The ending suggests that there will be another Alex McKnight book at some stage - hooray - but also that this book sets the tone for the next and presumably any that are to follow.
It has always perplexed me that this series hasn't attracted more attention and love and I presume that this is a move to make it more commercial. And this is a good thriller - albeit more unpleasant than I like (there's too much detail about how people get murdered in various nasty ways). But it's not really Alex McKnight #11, it's more Alex McKnight 2.0 #1, and I feel sad about that. If you are also in mourning for the series that was, I point you in the direction of Paul Doiron's Mike Bowditch series, which has a similar feel to it (although without the humour).