Scott Jericho thought he’d worked his last case. Fresh out of jail, the disgraced former detective is forced to seek refuge with the fairground family he once rejected.
Then a series of bizarre murders comes to light – deaths that echo a century-old fairground legend. The police can’t connect the victims. But Jericho knows how the legend goes; that more murders are certain to follow.
As Jericho unpicks the deadly mystery, a terrifying question haunts him. As a direct descendant of one of the victims in the legend, is Jericho next on the killer’s list?

In a nutshell

For the first third of this book, I thouglht I’d found something remarkable and that I’d found a new crime series to read that was confined by the normal tropes of police procedural fiction.

By the middle of the book, I was still impressed by the quality of the writing and the vivid, credible complexity of Scott Jericho, the main character, but I was struggling to engage with the plot.

By the end of the book I felt deeply disappointed. The plot stretched my disbelief so far that it snapped, making me feel as if I’d just been conned into spending time on an absurdly improbable story.

I won’t be continuing with the series.

My experience reading ‘Killing Jericho‘

@ 7%

Wow, what a start. Fast and vivid establishment of the main character and his recent history. Introduction to the world of travelling showmen. And a hook of a mystery. All done with a great control of pace and tension. I think this is going to be good.

@ 29%

 Lots of things to love here:

• how each chapter ends on a line that makes you want to read the next one at once,
• how the character of Scott Jericho, a large, attractive, intelligent, gay man as comfortable using violence as he is using his intellect, dominates the narrative rather than the killings and the grotesquely mutilated corpses
• how the showman world is the baseline for normal and the rest of us are odd.

@ 33%

 The intertwining of Scott Jericho’s past and present is fascinating. It does more than add tension to the thriller plot by revealing relevant details. It shows both how much Jericho has been damaged by trauma and that the angry, violent person that emerged from the trauma had always been part of the core of who he was. His rage at the world and his excitement in the face of risk are fundamental to him. Almost all the rest is learned behaviour.

@ 35%

 Everything in this novel feels grounded and real except for the murders themselves. The murderer’s actions feel incredibly theatrical and unnecessarily complex. I’m hoping there’s going to be a good explanation for that. At the moment it feels so out of kilter with the rest of the story that I can’t take the killings of the killer seriously.

Scott Jericho, not the plot, carries this story. He’s satisfyingly complex. Broken rather than flawed, a little ashamed of his own excitement in pursuing darkness and slowly realising that darkness has made its home in him.

The murder plot isn’t tense and there isn’t really enough detail to make it a mystery the reader can get with. Even to the detectives, the crimes feel self-consciously Gothic and artificial.

The detailed descriptions of the desecration of the bodies of the murder victims feels like an attempt to garnish a flat plot. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

@ 58%

I know Jericho often falls into the grip of rage and I can see that he is being sorely provoked but as an former police officer, he must understand that he is constantly risking having his parole revoked and being returned to the prison that is the source of much of his trauma. I find it hard to accept that he’d take these risks with so few precautions.

@ 100%

 What a disappointment. I’d become invested in Scott Jericho and the people around him. He’s vividly drawn and I’d have loved to see him develop over the course of a series but, after that ending, I won’t be going on with there books. The plot was too infeasible for me. I felt cheated by the solution. It was not only hard to believe, it was anticlimactic.

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I enjoyed Damian Lynch’s performance of ‘Killing Jericho’. I look forward to hearing more audiobooks narrated by him. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

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