Dominic

Fiction
Not one of those psychopaths

DOMINIC

By Mark Pryor

239 pp. Seventh Street Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Mystery writer Mark Pryor, best known for his acclaimed and popular Hugo Marston  mystery series, is back with a flawed yet worthy sequel to his equally acclaimed 2015 standalone novel, Hollow Man, (also reviewed on this site) which introduced readers to the most charismatic literary antihero since Tom Ripley.

Like the author who created him, Dominic is an Englishman living in Austin, Texas, where he works as a prosecutor by day and spends his nights playing guitar and singing at bars and clubs. Like most Texans, he wears jeans and cowboy boots and carries a pistol wherever he goes.

One of the D.A.’s top prosecutors, Dominic has been reassigned from adult to juvenile prosecution – not as a punishment, but because the city is too cheap to hire more prosecutors. Working juvenile means having to accept a steep cut in pay. It also means going from prosecuting murderers and rapists to prosecuting teenagers for shoplifting and smoking pot, an appalling waste of Dominic’s time and talent.

It’s enough to make anyone go postal, but Dominic isn’t like most people – he’s a psychopath. A highly intelligent psychopath with a cold, calculating mind and a ferocious instinct for self-preservation. But he’s “not one of thosepsychopaths” as he explained in his first outing. Though he can’t feel empathy, he has no sadistic tendencies and finds things like rape and child abuse grotesque. And he never kills unless absolutely necessary.

All Dominic wants is to be seen as one of the crowd – to fit in and build a good life for himself, not go to prison. So he projects the perfect image of a handsome, charming Englishman, dedicated prosecutor, and talented musician. The novel opens with Dominic reminiscing about his childhood in a British boarding school:

The first time I realized my potential for manipulating people was at age eleven, when the headmaster at my prep school handed me a bowl of soup instead of a beating.

The story begins with Dominic discovering that the latest juvenile up for trial is Bobby, the 15-year-old brother of his new girlfriend Elizabeth – the only woman to bring Dominic as close as he could possibly come to feeling genuine love for another human being.

The first time he met Bobby, he knew that the kid was a fellow psychopath. Bobby also recognized Dominic as one, and thinks of him as a cool older brother. Though Bobby is very intelligent, like most teenagers, (and unlike Dominic who learned self discipline at a younger age) he suffers from bad judgment and poor impulse control – deadly handicaps for a budding young psychopath.

Bobby has been charged with car theft, placing Dominic in a difficult position. If the kid has the book thrown at him, Elizabeth will be devastated and furious. If it gets out that the defendant’s sister is the girlfriend of a prosecutor, it could cost Dominic the juvenile court judgeship he covets. His dim-bulb colleague Brian McNulty also covets the job.

That’s actually the least of Dominic’s problems. Bobby tells him that while he was in jail, a policewoman named Megan Ledsome came to ask him about a certain murder case. Dominic has lunch with the detective and she tells him that Tristan Bell, Dominic’s former friend and roommate, who is serving time for murders resulting from a botched heist, is claiming that Dominic actually committed the crimes.

Of course, Ledsome doesn’t believe him, but she feels compelled to investigate his claims anyway. What she doesn’t know is that Dominic really did frame Tristan for the murders of their accomplice, the slimy slumlord they robbed, and the man’s rent-a-cop. Why? For two reasons: one, because Tristan, a compulsive gambler deep in debt, had blackmailed Dominic into bringing him in on the heist, and two, prior to the heist, Dominic discovered that Tristan was also a pedophile.

Things soon go from very bad to even worse. While Dominic is helping the retiring juvenile court judge figure out who’s trying to blackmail her with a video of her adulterous tryst, Detective Ledsome is gunned down in an obvious hit, and Bobby, who had casually offered to kill the policewoman for Dominic, goes missing.

Then, while doing his assigned ride-along with a police officer, (to advise the police on how not to blow cases) Dominic finds Bobby’s corpse in an empty drug den, a handgun nearby. He knows full well that psychopaths, with their strong instinct for self-preservation, rarely commit suicide.

As the noose tightens around Dominic’s neck, he must rely on his own instinct, his cold, calculating mind, and his talent for manipulating people in order to survive. The game is on, but the question is… who’s being played?

Unlike the first novel, which featured only Dominic’s first-person narration, here there are alternating first-person narratives. The narrative change is marked by the speaker’s first name in capital letters, but the title Dominicappears capitalized at the top of every page, which makes things a little confusing.

The other characters’ narration (except for one whom I can’t reveal without spoiling the plot) is uninteresting, adds little to the story, and bogs it down. The author should have stuck with Dominic as the sole narrator.

While not as good as the previous novel, Dominic is still a worthy sequel to Hollow Man and recommended to mystery fans.

Eric Petersen is 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

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