📖 The Anniversary Man

This disappointing crime thriller from Ellory (A Quiet Belief in Angels) focuses on a serial killer who restages famous murders with new victims across New York City. As the surprisingly ineffectual NYPD struggles to track down the Anniversary Killer, Det. Ray Irving finds himself unexpectedly allied with the enigmatic and reclusive John Costello, lone survivor of a previous serial killer's rampage and perhaps New York's foremost authority on serial killers. While the fiend strikes again and again, Ray is forced to depend on the fragile John, despite the personal cost to John as well as Ray's growing concerns about John's reliability. Ellory's operatic story, for all its entertaining purple-tinged prose and forays into the lurid underbelly of serial-killer fandom, brings little new to this familiar subgenre. His decaying New York as a place of unrelenting despair and violence will strike many as far more suited to the 1970s than to the present.