Hangman by Stephan Talty
Wednesday, May 14, 2014 at 9:38AM 
Published by Ballantine on May 13, 2014
Marcus Flynn, convicted of the serial killing of several teenage girls, escapes from prison under unlikely circumstances. How he manages the escape is one of the novel’s mysteries. The killer known as Hangman soon resurrects his career, sending panic throughout Buffalo. Police Detective Abby Kearney is charged with stopping him.
It’s a challenge for crime fiction writers to find a fresh angle on the “hunt for a serial killer” plot. Hangman follows a predictable formula -- the reader gets to know a teenage girl who eventually ends up in the hands of the killer as the detective races against time to save her -- but the formula is well-executed. While Hangman offers little departure from a standard police procedural storyline, the clues Kearney follows to find the killer keep the reader guessing. The ending is somewhat surprising without being overly contrived, a trick that scores points in this genre.
Hangman is worth reading for several additional reasons. The killer is suitably creepy. The steady pace never wavers and Stephan Talty generates a fair amount of excitement as the story rushes to its climax. Talty writes convincingly of Irish culture in Buffalo, particularly in the city’s police agencies, and of the class division between working class South Buffalo and the Ivy League North. He gives Kearney a strong, believable personality. Instead of turning her life into a soap opera or telling us in every third paragraph how much she cares about victims (as too many current crime fiction writers do when they create a female character), Talty gives Kearney a moral crisis to confront and allows her to confront it without becoming self-aggrandizing or self-pitying. For all those reasons, Hangman is formula fiction done well.
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