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MAPS OF HELL
by Paul Johnston
Mira, August 2010
432 pages
6.99 GBP
ISBN: 077830373X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Rarely do books get off to as good a start as this one. A cryptic prologue soon gives way to a tense and intriguing opening chapter. A man wakes up in captivity, naked and in pain, his memories gone. For once, I was sucked straight in, as eager as the unnamed prisoner to discover who he is, and why he is there, although the blurb on the jacket has already revealed that he is British crime writer, Matt Wells, who has been kidnapped by a secret militia who are conducting horrific experiments on their subjects involving brainwashing and murder.

Wells manages to escape from his captors, discovering a competence he didn't know he even had with weapons and evasion techniques, and ends up on the run, accused of three inventively gruesome murders, all of which seem to have some connection with the occult. His memory gradually returns, but only enough to give him tantalizing glimpses of his own past, not enough to provide any answers, but enough to make him realize that either himself or his pregnant girlfriend, Karen Oaten, a high-ranking British police officer who disappeared not long before Wells himself was snatched, have made some powerful enemies.

On his journey to save both himself and the woman he loves, Wells is both helped and hindered by people on both sides of the law. One area in which I felt the book fell down was in the depiction of the detectives from Washington DC’s homicide team who are drafted in to examine the bodies left behind by what they quickly come to believe is a serial killer with an unusual habit of killing his victims with twin skewers. The two detectives who play quite a large part in the action, and are forced, reluctantly, to hand their investigation over to the FBI, never seem to climb out of the box marked stock-characters. The FBI agents are beset by much the same problem.

As ever, I found the shift between the first-person narrative of Matt Wells and the parts of the action which follow other characters left behind a disjointed feel and the sense of more artificial cliffhangers than were strictly necessary, but the book did manage to sustain a good pace, interspersed with some tense action scenes and gripping escape sequences and, although it didn't quite live up to its opening scenes, it was still a satisfying read.

§ Linda Wilson is a writer, and retired solicitor, with an interest in archaeology and cave art, who now divides her time between England and France.

Reviewed by Linda Wilson, August 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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