Finished
Looking to the Woods by
Frédérique Molay, 4th and latest in her Paris Homicide series starring Unusually Young Chief of Police Nico Sirsky and His Team (and Assorted Members of His Family Who Frequently Make Reference to Being of Mixed Polish-Russian Descent Like They Were Being Paid By a Tourist Board). After an enjoyable pair of unusual cases with interesting setups and motivations, back to the crazed sadistic psychosexual serial killer taunting the authorities who have to outrace their murderous mission timeline drawing board. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.
Quite aside from the main plot—which in and of itself was not a bad idea, being a cribbed mashup from two Hitchcock films—which IMHO was simply executed rather flatly (and thus, poorly compared to its obvious potential) and despite going on about how each serial killer, copycat or otherwise, had a unique signature, failed to differentiate its usage of this plot point sufficiently to establish it convincingly enough, this was disappointing in other ways.
Because, not content with piling on the increasingly gorily murderous melodrama and shocking surprise twist upon shocking surprise twist, it also piled on the personal relationship drama in a very clumsy way that was probably supposed to cleverly tie into some themes about the victims of killings and their surviving loved ones and reflect some character development realization about the importance of other characters. But the whole thing was actually just a boring overdone cliché of the sort that would have been solved by one scene of the characters sitting down and talking to each other like adults (and was, though the author attempted to drag it out further), stretched out over around 75% of the story length, which I guessed pretty much right after it got so obviously set up early on and just kept waiting for the prolonged annoyance to be over.
There's a point where this sort of thing overloads from attempted bone-chilling tear-jerking pathos into unintentional utter ridiculousness, and that probably happened somewhere around the 40-60% mark. Look, just pick dwelling upon psychoanalyzing the killer's Really Deep Thoughts about the meaningful personal significance of their gruesome ritualized dismemberment habits or pick wallowing in the Designated Hero's anticipated heartbreak and depicting everyone around him feeling sorry about that but thinking he needs to confront the cause himself and that he really is loved and cared for by a wide variety of personally important people; don't try to stuff both into one not-that-long-or-complex series installment.
A sadly underwhelming continuation (apparently the author had shelved the manuscript for this one after completing the 3rd novel several years back, but the translation publisher persuaded her to finish it) to an otherwise fairly nifty international mystery series with a number of strengths to recommend its earlier installments. And this one did contain most of the better series qualities which made the previous ones so entertaining, just in lesser amounts and drowned out by the unimaginatively clichéd meh and its not-so-good series tendencies. Eh, hopefully the upcoming 5th, which is supposed to be a prequel, will do better. If nothing else, being a prequel will probably spare it from more of the particular overly sentimental personal relationship drama development that afflicted this one.
