Rating:

“Nothing is worse than being forgotten.”

Author: Alaina Urquhart

After starting the Dr. Wren Muller series out of order, reading and falling hard for The Butcher Game, I went back to the inception of a killer. The Butcher and the Wren is the first in the series, and it follows Jeremy Rose’s rise to fame as the Bayou Butcher and his entanglement with Dr. Wren, a forensic pathologist who is hot on his trail and has a personal vendetta against him.

Jeremy started his tendency towards violence young, dragging a friend into his escalating schemes and cover-ups. As author Alaina Urquhart takes us through Jeremy’s growing pains in the past, she contrasts a present-day series of murders in New Orleans. Something about the killer’s MO is familiar to Wren, and as the bodies pile up and the killer toys with the police, Wren realizes that she knows the man. She was, after all, the one who got away, and it appears that the game Jeremy is now playing is personalized for her.

In the first book in this series, the plot is actually less developed and emotional than the sequel, which shows a sudden improvement in both narrative style and emotive depth. In The Butcher and the Wren, we have the set-up for the story, but both Jeremy and Wren are underdeveloped stereotypes. They have no character arcs.

The story attempts to portray Jeremy as the clever killer, nearly mythic with how one-step-ahead of the police he is. What the narrative says – and it does a lot of “telling” and very little “showing” – is quite the opposite. Jeremy makes continual, obvious, rookie mistakes. This is our smart killer? Perhaps our investigators and Wren herself are actually asleep at the switch . . .

Which actually brings me to Wren. She has no personality here. Sometimes she shares facts, tells stories about similar serial killers, or flashes back dispassionately on the past . . . but she has no true personality. No likes and dislikes. No relationships or hobbies that make her stand apart. She is merely here as a prop and a foil, in equal part, and the fact that she fails to recognize THE TOTALLY OBVIOUS fact that the killer is toying with her in particular makes us question her supposedly superior investigative skills.

Image by TAI-Design from Pixabay

This poor characterization of both killer and investigator give the entire story a sloppy, haphazard feel, instead of the sleeker, more sinuously well-planned unfurling of the sequel. The story clearly wants to be one thing – and thinks of itself as clever and sophisticated – but it’s really more hodgepodge than horror. The elements of a good plot are there and don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad book, but it doesn’t make the high bar it attempts to set itself.

The conclusion is outlandish. It wants to be a clever twist – a set-up for sequel with ruthless killer and victim once again entwined in a battle of wits to the death. Instead, it’s just ridiculous. How are Wren and the police this unobservant? I can’t give it away, although I am tempted to because you won’t be satisfied with it anyway. Suffice it to say that the conclusion just leaves more questions and improbabilities. How did it get past editing? How are all these super clever detectives unable to do basic IDing? Has no one watched a horror movie before, or even a regular true crime thriller? Just no. No. The conclusion needs to go and be completely re-written with something that could actually happen.

It’s a weird way to read a book series – sequel first. I’m glad I did though, because honestly, If I’d read The Butcher and the Wren first, I wouldn’t have come back. It’s not that this book is bad – it just doesn’t stand out. Its mediocrity is typical, and it stands in place of many true-crime wannabe books which are heavy on factoids and serial killer lore and light on characterization and plot.

In the end, The Butcher and the Wren was just another ok thriller in a sea of thrillers. It falls to all the same old problems and same old tropes, relying on some true crime factoids to save it. The potential is certainly there – and realized in the sequel actually – but this first book is nothing special.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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