Shaun Hutson - Dying Words

[andydecker]

Shaun Hutson – Dying Words (Orbit, 2006, hc, 358 pages; this edition paperback.)

Cover: Larry Rostant

After last years Twisted Souls in 2006 came Dying Words, now in all editions under the Orbit imprint. Again this was a thriller novel with some horror tropes thrown in. As far as characters are concerned, this is by-the-numbers stuff for Hutson. You got (again) the damaged (and by this time tiresome) and hard as nails Detective Inspector Birch and the equally no-nonsense non-fiction writer Megan Hunter, who gets involved in a gruesome murder.

Orbit remained Hutson's publisher until 2010, after which he switched over to the short-lived Hammer Books and then to Caffeine Nights Publishing.

TBC …

[andydecker]

Dying Words begins with a (as usual) well realised car chase through London with the police chasing rapist/murderer Sanderson. The chase leaves 27 people injured and two million pound damage, and at the end a fed-up Birch tosses the culprit under the subway and gets away with it. But no rest for him, his next case is a gruesome murderer in which Megan Hunter gets involved.

Beautiful Megan Hunter has just published a book about Italian scholar Cassano who showed Dante the ropes and was tortured and killed by the inquisition for his ideas. Among the less convoluted ideas of his was the notion that gifted people have to pay for their genius in some tragic way.

Now somebody is killing colleagues of Megan Hunter in locked rooms, shredding them and taking their eyes without leaving any clues. D. I. Birch soon suspects successful and arrogant horror writer John Paxton, because every victim also incurred his wrath.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}
Birch finds out that Megan and Paxton had a child which was suffering from Cushing syndrome (a real disease) and officially died. But Megan, who is dying of a brain tumour, has learned from Cassano's papers how to write living people into stories. The murderer, a misshappen monster who was supposedly dreamed up by Paxton, now is killing the victims because Megan seeks revenge. Birch believes her and lets himself together with a tac-team written into the horror fairground where the monster lives. But Megan lied, the monster is her grown-up deformed son, and she wants to eliminate all witnesses before her death. All ends in a hail of bullets in the storyland, everybody dies, even Megan, who writes herself into the confrontation to help her son and shoots and tortures Birch before getting shot by Birch with his last bullets.

For most of the novel this is a typical and rather unspectacular procedural. There are doubtless a lot of satirical and mean allusions to the publishing world with Hunter and Paxton, but all murders take place off-stage. The hook with Cassano – at the time Dan Brown was popular - is not explored much; everything remains more or less exposition. The colourful ideas – Cassano wrote Dante into hell so could write his Inferno – are just sitting there, and the fairground setting at the end is very by the numbers. How and why Megan Hunter gets her abilities remains unexplained, and the ending doesn't makes a lot of sense.

The novel is competently written, even suspenseful if you can blend out the by now over-familiar bitchy characters and twists in the usual Hutson style. But it feels tired and missing some spark which used to be typical for the writer. The vast potential of the plot-elements is not realized, which in this case is sad.