Review: FAN MAIL - P. D. Martin

I heard that FAN MAIL by P.D. Martin has been published in both the UK and the US. So here is a re-post of the review I wrote when the book was published in Australia early last year.
Sunnie



FAN MAIL
P.D. Martin
Pan Macmillan.

Australian FBI profiler Sophie Anderson is given an easy job on her last day at Quantico. She is to give a guided tour of the FBI facility to a crime novelist and brief her on profiling. Sophie doesn’t warm to Loretta Black whom she finds rude and aloof.

One of the first things Sophie learns on arrival in Los Angeles to begin her new posting is that Black has been murdered. This obviously wasn’t a random act of violence. Black has been killed and her body posed in a manner that exactly duplicates her newly released novel. Feeling that she can give some insights Sophie contacts the detective investigating and offers to help. Among the fan mail Loretta Black has received is one signed simply “a fan”. It criticises the violence in Black’s book and seems to contain a thinly veiled threat warning her to stop. When another author is found murdered in the same way as the book she has written, Sophie and Detective Dave Sorrell believe they have found a serial killer who has perhaps killed before and will almost certainly kill again.

FAN MAIL is P. D. Martin’s third in the Sophie Anderson series and her strongest to date. Martin follows Sophie and Detective Sorrell as they conduct the investigation. So many detective novels are linear; we start at point A, go to point B and end at point C. No so FAN MAIL. It twists and turns; sometimes at breakneck speed, other times almost stalled as they hit dead ends. There is backtracking to re-question witnesses and suspects and frequent revisiting of evidence in light of new information. Gradually the detectives build up a picture of the crimes and the person responsible which enables them to solve the case.

Martin has also managed to pull off something that I don't think too many can do successfully. That is to write in the first person, present tense. Too often when an author does this, it feels awkward and contrived but in the case of FAN MAIL it works very well.

There quite a few references to Martin’s previous novel, THE MURDERERS’ CLUB, and a resolution of some loose ends that were left in that book. So if you are new to P.D. Martin’s writing, I recommend you read them in order.

Martin seems to be getting better and better with each book and I have become an unashamed fan of her work. I eagerly await her next offering.

2008 review originally published on Murder and Mayhem