Published by Atria Books on December 3, 2024
Crime and Punishment remains the greatest story about a murderer’s guilt. Adam Hamdy is no Dostoevsky, but Deadbeat takes an entertaining if over-the-top look at how guilt affects the life of a serial killer who learns that he might not have been murdering for a good cause.
Peyton Collard was a military engineer. He left the military for a civilian job so he could build a stable family. Unfortunately, he celebrated the job with too much alcohol, drove drunk, and killed nineteen-year-old Freya Prisco in a traffic accident. Collard went to prison for manslaughter, his wife left him, and he’s done nothing but accumulate debt since his release. Not to mention that Freya occasionally scolds him for killing her.
Prison taught Collard to take a beating, but that seems to be his only life skill. Having not learned much of a lesson from his manslaughter vacation, Collard tries to drown his guilt with nightly drinking at a bar with Jim Steadman, another ex-con. As protagonists go, Collard is more self-destructive than most. Readers might nevertheless sympathize with him because he has the good grace to feel guilty. Unfortunately, he so often tells us about his guilt that I got tired of hearing it. Dostoevsky let the reader see how guilt was consuming Raskolnikov; Collard can’t stop narrating his guilty thoughts.
A small bundle of cash turns up in Collard’s mailbox with the address of a website. A recorded message on the website promises to pay Collard a lot more money if he murders a nightclub owner who is dealing drugs and generally being a bad guy.
“Would you kill a bad person if doing so would make the world a better place for someone you love?” A murder that improves the world is still murder, but Collard asks and answers the question from the perspective of desperation rather than morality. Desperate men, Collard believes, don’t have “the luxury of moral certainty.” Dismissing morality as a disposable luxury seems to be a widely held opinion in today’s America. That’s a topic a book club could discuss in the unlikely event its members choose to read Deadbeat.
Collard sets morality aside and commits the murder. He’s paid but is quickly beaten and robbed by thugs who were drinking in his favorite bar. He commits a second murder to recoup his loss, then a third to pay for a nice place where he can hide from the thugs while impressing his daughter. His benefactor tells him that the second victim launders money for the mob and his third is a priest who diddles children.
As is the vigilante way, Collard tells himself that his killings are righteous. The ghosts of his victims disagree. Unsurprisingly, Collard learns that the ghosts might have a legitimate beef with him. The realization that his victims might not have been as evil as he thought compounds his growing guilt.
Collard is something of a dolt for not realizing he’s being played, but he’s a desperate dolt and the line between desperation and greed is thin. He becomes a baffled dolt when the bodies of his victims are mutilated in the morgue, postmortem crimes he didn’t commit but that inspire the media to refer to the serial killer as the West Coast Ripper. He’s an even bigger dolt for not understanding that he will be blackmailed into continuing his murder spree by the person who financed it. Can people really be this stupid? Sure they can, but I found it hard to believe that Collard would not have thought this through before committing the first murder. The guy is an engineer, after all.
This setup establishes the mysteries that must be resolved before the story concludes. Who paid Collard to commit the murders? What ties the victims together? Why are the bodies of his victims being mutilated postmortem? How do the thugs track him to his new home and why are they certain that he has hidden bundles of cash?
I found it hard to warm up to Collard — he’s self-pitying and, well, he’s a serial killer — despite his frequent and sincere proclamations of love for his daughter, whose need for a supportive father supposedly motivates Collard’s crime spree. My favorite character is a clichéd hooker with a heart of gold who gives Collard comfort when no one else will. Her refusal to judge Collard (she carries guilt of her own for an act of self-defense) might support a book club discussion about the evil of judging others, but I’m not sure that general rule applies to serial killers.
The hooker joins Collard in bemoaning life’s unfairness; to her, fairness is “just a comforting lie that’s designed to stop people tearing each other apart with the unfairness of it all.” She also offers a form of absolution when she assures Collard that what he did “makes sense when seen through the lens of your life,” a perspective that “means you’re not a monster, because monsters walk alone.” I’m not sure the hooker makes these points credibly, but I give Hamdy credit for taking a chance with his effort to create a sympathetic serial killer.
Two unimaginative action scenes turn Collard into a Reacher-like superhero near the novel’s end. I suppose Hamdy couldn’t come up with anything better to achieve his desired outcome, but Collard’s sudden proficiency in armed combat was one of several plot twists that I didn’t buy. The answer to the novel’s biggest question — what connects the people Collard is instructed to kill — is clever but preposterous.
Identifying the person who pays Collard scads of money to commit the murders isn’t difficult (there aren’t a lot of wealthy characters), but the criminal scheme is a ridiculously complicated way to achieve the villain’s end. The bad guy’s plan requires Collard to behave repeatedly in exactly the way that the villain predicts. The scheme is so unlikely to succeed that nobody with any sense would implement it — but then, if the villain had any sense, we wouldn’t have a plot, would we?
The artificially joyous ending is a gift to readers who insist on happy endings. Whether the protagonist deserves a happy ending is debatable, although forgiving readers who have sympathy for Collard might be pleased. Readers who think forgiveness should be accompanied by justice might be disappointed, although everyone has a different concept of justice, so it’s difficult to say whether readers will be satisfied with the outcome. I’m recommending the story because it entertains, not because I found it credible or was drawn to its muddled message.
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