Serial Killers
by Tony Fonseca
Hooper, Kay. Touching Evil. New York: Bantam Books, 2001. 358 p.
Randisi, Robert J. Blood on the Arch. New York, Leisure, 2001. 394 p.
Very few things can be more frightening or unsettling as knowing that a serial killer is loose in your area.1 For a woman, it means opening the newspaper and realizing that the current victims of the killer have the same hair color and are approximately the same age as she is; and it means changing one's daily routine in order to not become the next statistic. For the victim's family and friends, it means months, going on to years, of the sadness of having lost a loved one, of frustration with police and F.B.I. methods as the body count grows, and of anger aimed towards the faceless individual who considers the taking of human life a trivial matter. For police officers and F.B.I. agents, having a serial killer loose is no less unsettling and frustrating--especially since they will ultimately take the blame if the killer is more elusive than the average criminal.
Most horror and dark detective novelists deal very well with this latter phenomenon, that is of capturing the manhunt for the criminal and its effect on the detective in charge. Thomas Harris's Red Dragon , for example, emphasizes the psychic bond between the F.B.I. profiler Jack Crawford and the tattooed serial killer he is always one step behind. Both Kay Hooper and Robert J. Randisi succeed in this respect, as readers are drawn into the mental and emotional worlds of clairvoyant Maggie Barnes and detective extraordinaire Joe Keough. However, where Hooper manages to play on the reader's sympathy, not only for Barnes but for the victims of the Seattle killer who cuts out women's eyes and rapes them, leaving them for dead, Randisi never engages the reader's sense of justice or compassion; hence Blood on the Arch reads more like a hard-boiled Raymond Chandler piece than like an examination into the darker recesses of the soul, ultimately wandering into the patterns of predictability that such novels often do.
Randisi's preference for a detective with more machismo than emotion is especially frustrating because Blood on the Arch opens with such promise: St. Louis detective Joe Keough is enjoying a rare day off, engaging in one of his favorite activities, which is kite flying. For just an instant, when Keough gets that cell phone call and has to tell his new love interest, Valerie, that he is needed to investigate a homicide, he comes across as your average Joe, in other words, as human. Unfortunately this is short lived and Keough soon becomes super-macho detective, roughing up lawyers and politicians, leaving political and professional messes behind for McGuire, his understanding supervisor, to clean up. He manages to forget dinner dates and refuses to confide his fears of his own mortality (Keough finds out he is diabetic in this novel) with either Valerie or his partner, Al. And Keough's nonchalant attitude towards the grisly nature of the murders occurring under his watch wears thin very quickly. It is hard to imagine even the hardest of detectives having so little reaction to bodies that have been smashed with sledge hammers and gutted with pick axes, but Keough rarely gets beyond the realization that the killer created a real mess.
Just how predictable does Blood on the Arch get? Well, for starters, the red herring thrown out by Randisi is so transparent that even Keough should have been able to see through it. Still, it is difficult to fault Randisi with failing to produce an interesting puzzle, as most detective novels fail in this manner (hint: it's usually not the obvious "bad guy" but someone close to him who seems powerless and meek). Nonetheless, it is easy to fault the fact that he has Keough's partner killed off about three-fourths of the way through the novel, so that the hunt becomes "personal." And does the relationship between Keough and Valerie work out? I leave it to the readers of this review to guess that one. Perhaps the one saving grace of Blood on the Arch is Randisi's/Keough's love for the city of St. Louis. Randisi packs his novels with local diners, night clubs, expressways, and side streets in the way that Tony Hillerman (by the way, Randisi should note that even Jim Chee could keep a girlfriend for three or four novels, and when they did break up, it was usually cultural differences that mattered, not threats to the main character's machismo) populates his scenery throughout his Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mysteries.
Touching Evil, on the other hand, is more concerned with inner space than it is with exterior scenery, and Kay Hooper does a marvelous job of making her team of psychic detectives human and sympathetic. Hooper isn't so much concerned with detection per se as she is with the gamut of emotions that seize a community when it is gripped by a series of heinous serial killings. Seattle is indeed a wonderful city, but this fact is not what Hooper wants readers to take away after reading Touching Evil . What readers will feel, and this is rare in dark detective fiction, is a real sense of how devastating rape and disfigurement can be on victims and on the people in their lives. Hooper does this extremely well because the lead detective in her psychic team, Maggie Barnes, is a woman who literally feels the pain of others.
Touching Evil chronicles Barnes's first official case as part of Quentin Hayes's psychic detective team, which consists of true psychics who can glimpse the future, various clairvoyants, and a quiet database programmer who is never without her laptop (Fans of Charles Grant's Black Oak Detective Agency series will be chomping at the bit for more Quentin, Kendra, John, and Maggie tales). What is truly amazing is that Hooper manages gender equality within this organization, so machismo never becomes part of the equation. Barnes's talent is one that is missing from the agency: Barnes is able to walk into any abode and feel the violence that occurred within its walls. She can tell when arguments have occurred in certain parts of a house, and often has a clear sense of what those arguments were about. In addition, she can sense emotions from victims when interviewing them, and both she and her twin brother are gothic artists, often sculpting and painting images of the future (or is it merely the probable future, the text often asks) that are both disturbing and artistically beautiful.
Hooper throws in a little something extra in Touching Evil, as she delves into the possibility of past lives and familial connections between her murderer, his victims, Maggie Barnes herself, and past serial killers, hinting back as far to the earliest American literary serial killer, Charles Brockden Brown's Theodore Wieland. All of this makes for a ride through the gothic funhouse that ends with the confrontation of the killer by a psychic, a ghost, and one of his surviving victims. Although the fatal shot that ends the reign of terror ultimately has to come from a man, it is the power that the women--past, present, and future victims--possess that brings down the serial killer of women.
Hooper also avoids the predictability factor by not making her killer one of the novel's main characters. He, in fact, isn't seen in the novel until he is confronted at its end, and for all practical purposes this gives a more real sense to the story, as most serial killers are unknown until their capture or death. And given the fact that most serial killers are truly the most uninteresting part of the story about serial murderers, this is a blessing.
1 At the time of this publication, the city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana is besieged by two serial murderers, one a killer of poor African-American females, and the other a murderer of affluent Caucasian women. In fact, there are currently 29 unsolved murders of women in East Baton Rouge Parish, going back over the last decade or so. Our thoughts go out to the families of those victims, and to the victims themselves, whose lives were cut short so barbarously.