The Confession

I'm learning, as I read more of the Hard Case Crime series, that they are a hit-and-miss affair. For every outstanding work (most of them seem to be written by Laurence Block), there is a dud. The Confession, a new work by Domenic Stansberry, is the nadir so far. It is an unpleasant, dreary and most unforgivably, boring book.

The novel is a first-person narrative by Jake Danser, a forensic psychologist who hires out to legal teams to testify as to the sanity of criminal defendants. He is a character who is without a redeeming quality, a philanderer and a narcissist (he is vain about his hair, which he wears in a pony-tail). For 218 pages one must endure reading the inner-most thoughts of a guy who most would dismiss as a douchebag.

A book narrated by a prick isn't automatically bad, though. This one has the additional problem of being not very interesting. We learn that Danser is married to an older woman who happens to be rich. He also has a mistress, who ends up getting murdered--strangled with Danser's necktie. The murder doesn't occur until more than half the book is over, but since the jacket copy tells us that it will happen one reads the book and wonders when it will kick into gear.

The book doesn't work as a whodunit, as we never really learn the hard facts of who the killer is, although it suggested in a gimmick that was first used by Agatha Christie decades ago. It also doesn't work as a character study, as Danser is so noxious that it's impossible to raise any empathy for his situation. Stansberry also writes in a misogynistic strain, which was common in pulp mysteries from the old days, but not appropriate for something written in the twenty-first century.

The Confession was so bad that it's enough to make me think twice before reading another Hard Case Crime book.