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Cutter
Thomas Laird
Constable £16.99 |
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Reviewed by Les Hurst |
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Criminal profilers and other analysts use
powerful methods of deduction to identify potential criminals
and their ways of working. The most successful of these
scientists work in universities and in the laboratories of the
FBI. I used an older means of analysis in studying Thomas
Laird's Cutter - graphology. The first thing I was able to
identify was that alternate chapters are printed in italics -
this told me that the criminal was telling his own story. The
interwoven chapters continued in plain text - this told me that
the copper was unable to capture the fiend. It all ended within
250 pages - for the story of a psychopathic serial killer that
is unusual, since few of these freaks is normally caught in less
than twice that number of pages. That told me something about
the author.
In his first novel, Thomas Laird speaks in
the voice of Jimmy Parisi, a detective in the Chicago Police
Department. Parisi is hunting "The Farmer" - a sicko,
who murders women and steals their body parts. The detectives
have reduced their list of suspects to three - all of whom have
prior sex convictions and served in the medical services of the
US army. However, Parisi has only "Doc", his partner,
so while he can bring in the suspects for questioning, he has
limited resources to keep observation on the three. A failed
kidnap in a mall parking lot leaves a witness who saw almost
nothing. Glad as I was that someone should escape "The
Farmer" my suspension of disbelief started to fail. It
could, though, be a problem with me. That local police
departments don't have resources precisely because they are
local seems to be a problem all across the USA, but then I
waited for Parisi to go back to mall and study the CCTV footage,
and he did not. It may be true that Britain has the highest
proportion of CCTV in the world - Parisi gets no image of the
man who followed the victim around the shops. There may be no
opportunity, as standard, across the USA.
More bizarrely, though, and never
explained, Parisi learns through his contacts in the mob that "The
Farmer" is not only satisfying his own perverse tastes he
is also stealing the body parts to sell them to transplant
surgeons in Europe and Asia. Parisi has just spent a couple of
years losing his wife and then his girlfriend to medical
conditions - from all that time he has never picked up any
knowledge that makes him stop and wonder "what is this
thing called tissue matching?". "The Farmer" pays
no attention to it - I wouldn't want to acquire one of his
livers or kidneys. Who would? A song from the New Wave included
the line "Spare us the cutter". This one, I am afraid,
seems more like a pastiche of the genre.
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