THE MEMORY MAN

Savile (Coldfall Wood, 2018, etc.) launches his new
Eurocrimes series with this tale of revenge served curdled.

Just as Vatican envoy Ernesto Donatti is asking Peter Ash, of
the British branch of the European Crime Division, for help in tracking down Monsignor
Jacques Tournard, a newly appointed Paris bishop, who vanished shortly after a
receiving a package containing a human tongue, Swedish minister Henrik Frys
asks Francesca Varg, Ash’s local counterpart, for help in tracking down Jonas
Anglemark, the gay Swedish cabinet minister who’s also gone missing. The two
disappearances—one of them soon revised to a murder—are obviously connected,
and knowing genre fans will wait impatiently until Frankie and Ash make the
connection: a message both men received, Tournard along with the tongue
Anglemark donated, that reads only “Memini Bonn”: Remember Bonn. The hints
Savile throws out in his elliptical opening scene are already sufficient to
link both men to a long-buried secret, and eventually Frankie and Ash, often
working at cross-purposes, trace its genesis to an orphanage run by the
EuropaChild Foundation. Meanwhile, their quarry has moved on, marking each of
his targets by sending them a body part taken from a previous target before
moving in for the kill. Ash stakes out Pietro Danilo, the former manager of a
Romanian EuropaChild facility, as bait; Frankie goes through the paperwork on
the mounting list of victims looking for more clues; and Laura Byrne, the
office administrator who’s been Ash’s only surviving colleague back in London
ever since the death of their friend and partner Mitch Greer, seethes when her
frantic phone calls to Ash go to voicemail.

Everything—the motive, the modus operandi, the death scenes, the
charismatic villain’s ability to inspire deeply misplaced confidence in both
his victims and the authorities—is just a little too pat, emphatic, and
predictable. The result reads like a bloody synopsis of all the serial-killing
revenge fantasies you’ve ever read.