Every Dead Thing

The moment I read the prologue, I felt my skin crawling. There was a mystery hanging in the air, a creepy promise that this book could be the thriller I was looking forward to read. I was hooked on the spot. But then I was drifting.

In Every Dead Thing we follow Charlie Parker or as they call him, Bird. He is an ex-cop whose wife and kid were murdered by a serial killer, the Traveling Man. Bird is determined to find the killer defying morality and laws. Driven by visions of the dead, Parker tracks a serial killer from New York City to the American South, and finds his buried instincts -- for love, survival, and, ultimately, for killing -- awakening as he confronts a monster beyond imagining...

The book is well written and detailed. Maybe more detailed than I would like in order to enjoy it. It starts about Bird's story but pretty soon we see him taking over a case about a missing young woman. His wife's and kid's death are always in his mind so he need to occupy himself or else we'll end up drinking again. And that is where I found the book dragging.

Chapter after chapter we follow Bird unraveling stories about mafia, rich people and artists tangled in murders, and death is hovering over this book like a fly. Which is not a bad thing if the characters who died meant something to me.

But I couldn't connect.

I didn't care about the mafia's storyline, about the death of some unknown men who would end up giving a clue about the Traveling Man or not. It was just too much.

I felt like I was bombard with too much info and most of the chapters felt like info bumps. All I cared about was the Traveling Man but in order to get to him I had to go through a bunch of other sub stories. A sub-plot is crucial in a book but when things stretch so much it's chaotic. I think the author wanted to mess with our minds, tangle the story so we couldn't figure out the killer, but guess what. I was irritated by the amount of info and I knew who the Traveling Man was.

Despite that, the concept of the book was great. the way the killer used the bodies of his victims to say something to the word and I must admit that it was pretty solid. The details about the human body, the way the scenes were described, it was good. And unmasking the killer could be a huge surprise if I hadn't figure it out.

So I'll give this book threes stars because all the parts about Bird's story were pretty damn good and because it was indeed a well written story.

Here are some quotes that stick to the mind.

“The things you regret are the things you hold on to.”

“You can’t bluff someone who isn’t paying attention.”

“We live in a culture of pain and death, Bird, and most of us go through life without ever really understanding that. Maybe it was only a matter of time before we produced someone who understood that better than we did, someone who believed he had to make an example of us all!”

“There are no coincidences only patterns.”

“Everything has to be interpreted, everything is codified. To live with sings is to understand the necessity of finding meanings in seemingly irrelevant pieces of information.”