Book Review - The Death List

The Death List by Paul Johnston

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love books about writers. While I've never read anything by this Scottish author before, I grabbed the book while working at the Canmore library because it was about a mystery writer who gets caught up in the antics of a fan-turned-serial-killer. As a writer myself (okay, mostly a journalist and a wannabe author) I feel a connection with books about writers, and find them particularly fun.

The story takes place in London, and is full of fun (for me at least) slang and colloquialisms and bits of British culture. They don't detract from the story as happens sometimes, when you're trying to figure out what x means, but give it a nice richness that modern who-dun-its sometimes lack. I find it charming when oh my god - a character produces a gun!!! So shocking in England, the land of few handguns. We have very few here in Canada either, but growing up in the US gave me a jadedness about guns in crime novels that did make me laugh at this point, particularly at the shock of another character in seeing it.

I'll admit that I had the mystery accomplice figured out by a quarter of the way through the book, but that's not uncommon for me and didn't detract from the plotline either. It's rare for an author to put one over on me for very long, and I don't hold it against them. I did find the twists and turns in this book exciting and interesting, and it kept me up reading late into the night a couple of times, because I just had to know what happened next. While this book isn't anything intellecutally engaging, it's very, very entertaining.



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