Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Santa Killer by Ross Greenwood. My thanks to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Boldwood Books for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do check out the posts by my tour buddies for today, Jen at Jen Med’s Book Reviews and over on Instagram, Deb at Debs Book Reviews.
About the Book
The Santa Killer is coming to town…
One night less than two weeks before Christmas, a single mother is violently assaulted. It’s a brutal crime at the time of year when there should be goodwill to all. When DI Barton begins his investigation, he’s surprised to find the victim is a woman with nothing to hide and no reason for anyone to hurt her.
A few days later, the mother of the woman attacked rings the police station. Her granddaughter has drawn a shocking picture. It seems she was looking out of the window when her mother was attacked. And when her grandmother asks the young girl who the person with the weapon is, she whispers two words. Bad Santa.
The rumours start spreading, and none of the city’s women feel safe – which one of them will be next
He’s got a list. It’s quite precise. It won’t matter even if you’re nice.
Format: ebook (437 pages ) Publisher: Boldwood Books
Publication date: 12th September 2022 Genre: Crime
Find The Santa Killer on Goodreads
Purchase The Santa Killer
Amazon UK
Link provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme
My Review
I only discovered the DI Barton series when I joined the blog tour for the previous book, The Fire Killer, which was book five. Now we’re at book six and what may be the last outing for DI Barton although you never know what the New Year might bring. (In fact, the author is embarking on a new crime series set in Norfolk, an extract from which is included at the end of the book.)
As in The Fire Killer, I enjoyed the glimpses into Barton’s home life. It’s his family that keeps him grounded, especially his wife Holly. However, the run-up to Christmas sees him more conscious than ever of the toll his work takes on him, and on them: the long hours, the missed family events, those late night phone calls, the dangerous situations he may be confronted with.
The book’s structure follows the pattern of the previous book opening with a dramatic scene whose relevance will take some time to be come clear. From that point on the story switches between Barton’s investigation into a series of assaults on women by a perpetrator who may have adopted a seasonal disguise but is definitely not the bringer of festive greetings, and the first person narrative of The Santa Killer. We know a few details about their background, witness their actions and the impulses that drive them but we don’t know their identity. But when we find out, that should be it shouldn’t it? Think again.
The Fire Killer took place against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact that lockdown had on people. The author incorporates a range of social issues into The Santa Killer including mental illness, marital breakdown and financial hardship, the sort of stresses and strains that can bring out the worst in people but perhaps should also be treated with compassion. Through Barton’s eyes we also get an insight into the pressures on the criminal justice system and its inability always to deal appropriately with vulnerable individuals.
Barton adopts his customary painstaking approach to the investigation, forced to carry out much of the legwork himself because there are simply no other resources available. However, when he is able to use some of his old team, he’s great at encouraging ideas, welcoming thoughts about different possible angles and, of course, recognising the value of the hunch. ‘Good coppers had hunches. That was why they were the best. Hunches didn’t help prosecutions, but they kept you in the game. They kept you focused. Any break might be a small one. You needed to be ready and looking.’
Talking of being ready and looking, as I read The Santa Killer I carefully made a list of possible suspects – it turned out to be a long list – but, no doubt to the author’s delight, I had to cross through each and every name on it. Yep, he fooled me with an ingenious addition to the narrative.
The Santa Killer is a cleverly constructed, pacy and engrossing crime mystery. I shall be sad to say farewell to DI Barton and his team – especially the banter between Barton and Sergeant Zander – but I’ll look forward to reading the author’s new series, this time starting from the beginning.
In three words: Intriguing, absorbing, clever
Try something similar: Requiem in La Rossa by Tom Benjamin
About the Author
Ross Greenwood is the bestselling author of over ten crime thrillers. Before becoming a full-time writer he was most recently a prison officer and so worked everyday with murderers, rapists and thieves for four years. He lives in Peterborough.
Connect with Ross
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
About the Book
From Russia With Love stood out among Fleming’s work. Agent 007 doesn’t even make an appearance until a third of the way into the story, instead Fleming takes you behind the Iron Curtain in a detailed exploration of the dark operations of the MGB (precursor to the KGB) and SMERSH, Stalin’s counter-intelligence agency. Fleming wrote the book at the start of the Cold War, as Britain and the United States were coming to grips with a new, dangerous enemy. It was a new era, where the old rules no longer applied. It wasn’t the black and white world of earlier noir fiction or war novels, it was a world where you no longer knew who you could trust. Fleming isn’t always given his due as a writer but he opened the door for a broad range of Cold War novels which reflected the growing tension between East and West for decades.
One of the best first novels is The Dark Tunnel (originally published in 1944 under the name Kenneth Millar) but later reissued under the more well-known pseudonym, Ross MacDonald. MacDonald was influenced by Raymond Chandler and John Buchan, but he puts his own twist on things. The book is set in the early days of WWII in a university town, not unlike Ann Arbor where MacDonald taught. It’s a fast-paced tale with protagonist Professor Robert Branch fighting for his life against a German spy conspiracy as well as petty crooks, rural rednecks, Union men and university politics. What makes the book especially tense is the conspiracy going on that’s bigger than Professor Branch realizes, and it just keeps getting darker. The pacing is a bit uneven compared to MacDonald’s later works but there’s a level of paranoia MacDonald never captured in his more famous Lew Archer PI series.
Conspiracy and paranoia are two themes that also come out in Mickey Spillane’s fourth Mike Hammer novel, One Lonely Night (1951). Hammer is a US government-trained killer from WWII trying to adapt to life stateside as a private investigator.
Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File (1962) is the definitive noir Cold War novel. Its unnamed hero was christened Harry Palmer and portrayed by Michael Caine in the 1965 adaptation and follow-on films. In this remarkable first novel, Deighton created the ultimate noir protagonist trying to survive in a system set against him. Palmer’s a street-smart working-class punter who is pulled into a game he cannot win. Assigned to track down a top military scientist who is being sold to the Soviets, Palmer is kidnapped, whisked behind the Iron Curtain and electronically brainwashed by Chinese captors. When he manages to escape, he finds a much more sinister interpretation that calls into question the nature of Cold War alliances. If you can’t trust your allies, who can you trust? Coming off the “special relationship” between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in WWII and the brainwashing of US troops by the Chinese in the Korean War, this was pretty shocking stuff.
John le Carré, pen-name for former intelligence officer David Cornwell, published his third novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in 1963 at the height of the Cold War. (My brother and I joke that virtually any novel set between 1957 and 2022 can be said to be “at the height of the Cold War” as global tensions continued to escalate.) The Spy Who Came In From the Cold became an immediate bestseller. Its protagonist, WW2 veteran Alec Leamas, takes on one last case in order to avenge the death of a colleague. It involves a descent into the underworld of working-class trade unions and local communist party reps in order to infiltrate East Germany and bring down his nemesis. As with the best noir fiction, Leamas succeeds, but pays the ultimate price.
Walter Mosley’s first novel, Devil in the Blue Dress (1990), brought about a resurgence in the noir genre. His hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins (who deserves an entire article to himself) like many noir protagonists before him, is a WWII veteran up against a system meant to keep him down. Rawlins, manages to survive and even win despite the institutional racial discrimination against him, a topic as relevant today as it was in the 1950s.
About the Authors
What Cathy Read Next... 