Hope to Die by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Spoilers ahoy. And in the same way that Block repeats nuggets from Scudder’s past in every novel, I’ll repeat what I’ve said in past reviews: why are you reading a review of the 15th book in a series if you’ve haven’t already read the other fourteen, and if you’ve read that many, I don’t see how my review could ever be a useful means by which to decide if you should read the rest. So this is a discussion, not a review. Caveat lector.
We’ve been with Matthew so long that not only do we no longer need to have him explained as much as we used to, we don’t even need his secondary characters explained. So that just leaves the bad guy. And this is a huge departure from what we’ve seen before in the Scudder novels.
Which is great, on the one hand, in so far as we’re not getting the same old thing. Reading, once again, about murder and rape and fireplace pokers, but this time from the villain’s point of view. On the other hand, when you stay with a series through well over a dozen novels, maybe it’s because you want the same old thing. Murder and rape and fireplace pokers, and Matthew finding the guy who did it in between AA meetings.
I’ve said in past reviews that, with a few changes, those books could have had an entirely different main character. That’s even more true for Hope to Die, were any subplot activity is fueled by all of the things Matthew did in the previous novels, and could be easily replaced by adding a few extra expository pages for whatever new character put in there.
In other words, and this is what I’ve been trying to get at through this review: this is not a Matthew Scudder novel, with murder and rape and a fireplace poker. This is a murder and rape and fireplace poker novel, with Matthew Scudder.