2019 Kindle Book Award Semi-Finalist (Mystery/Thriller) A MOB BOSS IS EATEN ALIVE BY TIGERS AT THE BRONX ZOO. A New Jersey factory owner is mutilated and left to bleed out under a Manhattan highway. A French pharmaceutical baron is tortured and frozen to death in Little Italy. A high-society fashion designer is poisoned in her Upper East Side apartment. Four months, four unsolved murders – each … murders – each carried out on the last Saturday night of the month.
The victims share no similar traits, have no connections to each other, have no common enemies, and were each killed in very different ways. NYPD Detectives Mike Stoneman and Jason Dickson pick up the trail based on the coincidental timing of the unsolved murders. Could these assassinations really be the work of a single serial killer? Why would a single killer choose such strange and disparate methods? Why spread your victims across all of New York? And most importantly, how do you track down someone with no discernable pattern?
Each new murder adds a piece to the killer’s jigsaw puzzle, but even unravelling the clues and finding the killer’s pattern may not be enough to catch him. Mike and Jason bring in help from FBI profiler Angela Manning, and together they start to close in. But will they be able to stop the elusive killer before he completes his decathlon of death? Each month is a race against the calendar. On the last Saturday of the month, there will be blood.
Follow Detective Mike Stoneman as he tries to outwit a most complex killer. Then, as a special free bonus, read the award-winning short story, Fool Me Twice, the very first episode in the Mike Stoneman saga.
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A Familiar Crime-Thriller Plot Implemented with Some Gruesome Action
Righteous Assassin features a dinosaur of a police detective (Detective Mike Stoneman) who has seen it all. He’s partnered with a young, ambitious rookie. Over the course of the story, he develops a romantic interest in an intelligent, attractive woman. And of course, he has a brilliant, psychotic, serial killer to chase. Sound familiar? If you’re a reader of crime thrillers, these threads should be. And so, the question becomes, how effectively are they implemented by the specifics of this book? For the most part, I’m happy to say, quite well with one ‘it depends’ on the list. That last factor is the author’s use of violence to provide much of the tension. You only need look at the first three sentences of the book’s synopsis to know that rather bizarre deaths play an important role in the story. The descriptions of those assassinations are often explicit, which may make the violence over-the-top for some readers. Be forewarned.
There are many factors, however, where I don’t need to equivocate. The writing is excellent, with a good mix of believable dialog and descriptive storytelling. The main characters – Stoneman, Detective Jason Dickson (the partner), and Dr. Michelle McNeill (the love interest and Medical Examiner) – are well developed, although the times Dr. McNeill ‘giggled’ seemed a bit out of place. The pacing was excellent. As the killer planned his murders for the last Saturday of the month, there was always a countdown to make the detectives sweat and to keep our stomachs in a knot. And there was even some humor that I enjoyed, such as Dickson trying to help Stoneman with his budding relationship with McNeill. But other quips, particularly some of the stationhouse humor, seemed a bit juvenile and crass.
Of the factors that could have used attention, a lack of realism in police procedure would be the top of my list. For example, knowing the killer had planned three escape routes from one assassination site, the four detectives and two building security officers covered exactly one entrance … and then, let the door slam. Of course, the killer escaped. Or in another place, the detectives knew the killer had been in the Army and they had a sample of his blood and yet, they never checked the military’s DNA database. Many of the leads they pursued, on the other hand, seemed destined to failure from the start – like tracing a name that was surely an alias. And finally, some of their breakthroughs seemed a bit too convenient, the connection to the Plagues of Egypt being an example. Even so, these limitations didn’t outweigh a very dynamic, gut-wrenching story.
Overall, Righteous Assassin is a somewhat prototypical, crime thriller that sets itself apart with excellent writing, good character development, edge-of-your-seat pacing, and significant, sometimes explicit violence. With greater attention to police procedure, its appeal could have been increased even further.
Righteous Assassin builds great tension from the opening chapters. The pace build a steady sense of dread as the cops race against the killer who felt like a baddie straight out of the Dexter series.
The overall plot arc gives off a “Se7en” vibe as the straight-shooting investigators must rely on their instincts and police skills to try to stop the villain. There are no easy saves for the two cops, and they held the lion’s share of my interest in the story moreso than the POV sequences from the murderer’s perspective.
The book is well-written and edited and I only found a pair of minor typos. (A formatting glitch near the start and part of a name vanished, giving one character’s name a humorous new definition.)
For thriller and detective fic fans alike.
Great characters, fantastic writing, and a story that makes this book hard to put down! This book is about an old school detective hot on the trail of an elusive killer on the loose (even though he is sidetracked a bit by a love interest)…but I think everything fits together perfectly to make this book excellent. You will find plenty of detailed descriptions and explicit explanations which some might find distasteful, however, it certainly doesn’t detract from the story, so if you are one who complains when you find foul language or blood and gore in your detective/murder/mystery novels, don’t bother, just go pick up a cozy. If you are looking for a well-told story that rivals the best of the bestselling authors, this is the one for you!
Huge props to Chapman for creating a serial killer with a unique pattern to his kills: base each murder on one of the Plagues of Egypt. The brilliance of that concept is that the detectives, Stoneman and Dickson, were powerless to predict who would be the next victim or where it would occur. Only near the end did the connection between the victims become clear (and rather obvious, in hindsight).
The prose was solid. The plot proceeded logically. Chapman creatively inserted a “ticking clock” element (time pressure) –each murder occurred on the last Saturday of the month. The requisite sub-plots appeared (tension between partners and Stoneman’s romantic interest in the ME). Also, Chapman didn’t turn his killer into an over-the-top caricature of a crazy psychopath as some authors do.
Minor detractions were the sluggish pace in the book’s midsection and overly stiff, formal dialogue between all the LEOs that didn’t ring realistic for me. Some unnecessary details and descriptions caused the sluggishness, and the vast majority of detective novels I’ve read are much looser and “slangy” with dialogue than is this book.
The story is based on an old school detective and his eager rookie as they mesh their skills in investigating crime. Great writing, compelling storyline; who can turn down Mob boss eaten alive by tigers in the Bronx? It is a great vigilante thriller with characters that jump out of the pages at you. The tempo is right on track too, don’t expect to relax during this read the POV changes will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Highly recommended, this is my first book by this writer but not my last!
This is the first I have read by this author but it definitely will not be the last. I enjoy the fact that it was written with both the killer’s and the detective’s point of view. This is one of my favorite genre and I was not disappointed by this author. It was suspenseful and kept me on the edge of my seat. I would recommend this book to anybody who likes reading mysteries and thrillers. I am now going to go find the other books written by Kevin G Chapman my new favorite author.
If you are looking for an edge of your seat crime thriller this is the book for you. Righteous Assassin, will keep you turning the pages, as Mike Stoneman and his partner Jason Dickson race the calendar to stop the next murder. The killer has a secret blog where we get to see into his mind, and let me tell you it is not a mind you want to linger in. It is these pages that caused me to give only 4 stars, the violence was to explicit for me and at times I had to put the book down. If you like that sort of stuff you will love the killers blog post. The story was intense, the characters likable, minus the killer of course, and an overall great read.