Written in Blood

Fiction
Murder by the books

WRITTEN IN BLOOD

By Layton Green

335 pp. Seventh Street Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Mystery writer Layton Green is back with a new novel whose intriguing plot is sure to please.

Detective Joe “Preach” Everson is not your ordinary cop. A former teenage hellraiser turned preacher turned prison chaplain turned police officer, he’s come back to his hometown of Creekville, North Carolina after working as a homicide detective in Atlanta.

Creekville is a small, quaint little town that’s one of the few liberal bastions in a fiercely conservative state, a town where radical progressive liberals peacefully co-exist with their old school Southern conservative neighbors. Where hipsters and good ol’ boys go about their business and never seem to get on each other’s nerves.

But as Preach Everson is about to discover, there’s a chilling dark side to the quiet, respectable town he calls home. The novel opens with the detective at the scene of a bizarre and brutal murder:

The body was lying faceup on a sheepskin rug, the top of the head caved in like a squashed plum. Detective Joe “Preach” Everson kneeled to view the corpse. To him, the splayed limbs suggested an uninhibited fall, rather than a careful arrangement of the body.

Which didn’t fit with the two miniature crosses, one wood and one copper, placed side by side on the slain man’s chest.

Officer Scott Kirby eyed the battered skull and let out a slow whistle. “What did that? A sledgehammer?”

Since Preach is the only detective in Creekville with homicide experience, the case falls to him. It’s the first homicide he’s worked since the case in Atlanta that nearly destroyed him – the case of a twisted serial killer of children.

Preach saved a terrified, traumatized little boy from becoming the killer’s next victim, but suffered a mental breakdown in the process, and the killer slipped through his fingers. He also suffered a crisis of faith and doesn’t know what he believes in anymore.

As a condition of his employment with the Creekville Police, he must see a therapist for counseling. Fortunately, he’s seeing the best psychologist there is – his Aunt Janice. He’s closer to her than his own mother.

Preach’s murder victim is identified as Farley “Lee” Robertson, who owns a local bookstore / coffeehouse called the Wandering Muse. He interviews the assistant manager, a young law student named Ari Hale, who claims that she overheard Lee arguing violently with a writer named J. T. Belker before his death.

When Preach shows her a photo of the crime scene, Ari is shocked not so much by the ghastliness, but by what she recognizes. Whoever killed her boss carefully staged the crime scene, recreating the murder of the evil old pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna by the desperate student Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment.

Later, Preach’s mother tells him that she went to high school with Lee Robertson, who was “popular but not well-liked, if you know what I mean. In high school, he had a talent for making people feel small. Honestly, he was rather mean.”

Lee did have one close friend, the popular horror novelist Evan Shanks, known by his pen name, Damian Black. They’d been best friends since high school, and Black is shocked and saddened when Preach informs him of Lee’s death. He knew about the dispute between Lee and J.T. Belker, whose manuscript Lee had rejected for publication by the very small press that he owned with Black.

Belker quickly becomes the prime suspect, but then the investigation takes a sharp and disturbing turn when Wade, Preach’s old pal from high school, now a courier for local redneck drug lord Mac Dobbins, reveals that Lee had a very expensive drug habit. With his businesses struggling, Preach knows that he couldn’t have afforded it. Wade also claims that he delivered large sums of cash to Lee from Damian Black.

Preach suspects blackmail, which is confirmed when a forensic examination of Lee’s cell phone yields a photo of Damian Black having sex with an underage Asian boy and girl. When he goes to haul the writer in for questioning, he finds Black’s corpse stuffed up his fireplace, his face slashed to pieces with a straight razor.

Curious objects including a topaz earring, silver spoons, and plastic gold coins are placed about the crime scene. It’s a recreation of one of the killings in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

A search of the house reveals something even more shocking – the kinky sex dungeon where Damian Black and Lee Robertson both explored their perverted desires. It doesn’t take long for the story to be leaked to the media, which goes into a frenzy over the man they’ve dubbed the Literary Killer.

As Preach faces another serial killer, his faith in his hometown and his god – and his sanity – will be severely tested as he uncovers a monstrous trail of cruelty and depravity going back to the victims’ high school days, and a web of corruption leading all the way to the mayor’s office.

When his only viable suspect becomes the Literary Killer’s next victim, Detective Preach Everson realizes that he’s dealing with a brilliant killer who’s writing the ultimate masterpiece of vengeance, inspired by great works of literature.

But nothing could have prepared him for the horror to come…

Written in Blood is a relentlessly paced mystery that’s part old-school whodunit, part modern police procedural and part psychological thriller, with a knockout ending that the reader will never guess… and never forget. Highly recommended!

-->

Eric Petersenis an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com.