Hawke, Richard - COLD DAY IN HELL

[LJ Roberts]

COLD DAY IN HELL (Priv. Invest.-Fritz Malone—NYC-Cont) - Poor Hawke, Richard – 2^nd in series
Random House, 2007, US Hardcover – ISBN:

First Sentence: On the last day of her life, she took a yoga class.

Private Investigator Fritz Malone becomes involved in a case where late-night television host, Marshall Fox, has been accused of serial rape. When additional corpses, with the same M.O., show up while Fox is in jail, it raises the possibility of either a mistrial or a copy-cat killer.

Mr. Hawke has let me down with his second book. My first problem was with the characters. Had I not read the first book, which should not be assumed by the author, I would not have had a sense of any of the characters. Even worse, other than the protagonist, Malone, and a police detective, Megan Lamb, there wasn’t a single character about which I cared. My second issue was point of view. Not only did the point-of-view change constantly, but so did the time period which made the story very confusing. My third issue was the pace. The story moved very slowly right up until the very end. I found myself putting the book down and not really caring whether I picked it up again. And then, there’s the plot. It really didn’t make much sense for Malone to have been involved in the case in the first place, nor for the police to have handed so much of the case over to Fritz, and I found the ending wholly unsatisfying. I really found this a very disappointing second novel and certainly wouldn’t rush out to buy the third.