AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: Desert Kill: A Novel by Philip Gerard ISBN: 0-688-12641-3 Publisher: Harpercollins Pub. Date: 01 July, 1994 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.00

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 2.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Intelligent but somewhat flavourless thriller
Comment: Gerard is an academic and this may go some way to explaining the tone of this book-dry and analytical,told in a prose that refuses to ignite and take the reader by the throat and thus we are left with a book that is ultimately just OK
It is replete with references to clasic American short stories taught by the hero in his college classes-ones in which the macabre seem to predominate(Poe,O,Connor,Faulkner,Shirley Jackson)
The hero is Roy Pope whose uncle is a veteran Phoenix,Arizona cop.Roy becomes involved in a series of murders which sets the city by its heels starting with the discovery of the body of a young woman,found dead and decapitated by the railroad tracks.Several other bodies ,all brutally hacked about ,turn up including several killed years earlier and dumped in the Arizona desert.
Profiling builds up the picture of the killer as a loner,socially functional and possessed of a near genius IQ
The book is the story of the hunt for the killer,taking in sub-plots around sexual abuse and sexual guilt all played out against a well realised Sothwestern backdrop and with ,in Roy a flawed and human protagonist striving to come to terms with a shed load of marriage related guilt
It is the cop uncle-Paul-who is the moral centrepiece of the book and he is a man who in many ways ,by his morality and ethical code represents the old Phoenix,the frontier town rather than the new and modern city.
Neither the villain nor Roy really come alive and to really propel a serial killer novel to the heights you need a stronger bad guy than you get here and more intense action scenes

Its not bad but devotees of the genre will find greater pleasures elsewhere in the literature

Rating: 2
Summary: Reads like a shallow screenplay
Comment: A good ol' boy sheriff and his trusty young sidekick are on the trail of an unknown psychopath who mutilates his victims in unspeakable ways. Sound familiar? While gore fans [sic] may appreciate the author's detailed descriptions of how the victims (gorgeous young women, of course) are chopped up and discarded, I just felt sick. There are some thoughtful characterizations, an all-action climax and a even a final plot twist. But the book ultimately reads like a shallow screenplay, begging to go to Hollywood and land the easy big bucks seemingly available to anyone prepared to plumb the serial killer depths.