Shaun Hutson - Body Count

[andydecker]

Shaun Hutson – Body Count (Orbit, 2008, hc, 370 pages)

Cover: Russell Lee

In 2008 Shaun Hutson still got his yearly novel into the bookstores.

This is again a thriller without any supernatural elements. Basically it is a version of The Most Dangerous Game. There are snuff-movies on the internet and the police is baffled. Masked guys hunt and kill other masked guys, hacking them in pieces. Nobody seems to earn any money with it, it is even disputable if this is real. DI Chapman is the usual Hutson hero, a disillusioned bitter asshole copper who is looking for his underage runaway daughter on the streets. He is responsible that she ran away. So he is even more desperate and bitter than most of Hutson's protagonists. The police discovers that the killed on film men are violent criminals.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}Chapman finally looses it and kills a suspect. On the way to jail he is kidnapped by the film makers. Deranged millionaire Seymour kidnaps known criminals and lets beat themselves to death out of revenge; some unknown muggers beat his son and turned him into a vegetable. Chapman couldn't solve the case, so now he also becomes a participant in the game. To motivate the DI they also kidnapped daughter is now part of the last game.

You don't read Hutson because his plots are even remotely realistic. It is all very of its time, CCTV everywhere and everything gets recorded on film, and of course Hutson is smart enough to even acknowledge The Most Dangerous Game. He even increases the violence, it is his most gory book in years, nail gun to the eayes and other body parts. Still it becomes a bit dull after a while, and some twists are not very believable.

Terrible, banal cover. Bland doesn't describe it.

[ripper]

I thought I had read this one, but Andy's summary rings not the faintest of muffled bells. That's the trouble I have with Hutson's later novels, they just don't stand out from one another for me.