Los Angeles

On her last day at FBI headquarters at Quantico before transferring to the Los Angeles field office, Australian FBI profiler Sophie Anderson is given the task of showing crime author Loretta Black around the facilities. She finds Black to be rude and overbearing, and is glad when the tour is over.

Within days of Sophie's arrival in Los Angeles, Black is found murdered in bizarre circumstances. She has been killed in exactly the same way as the victim in her latest book. It doesn't take long for Sophie to link this crime with the murder of another crime author several months earlier in San Francisco. She too had been killed in the same manner as one of her fictional victims.

When another author disappears in circumstances similar to the plot of her most recent book, Sophie is involved in a desperate race against time to catch the killer before he can kill again.

FAN MAIL is the third book featuring psychic FBI profiler Sophie Anderson. I have to admit that I don't normally like woo-woo in crime fiction, and Sophie's psychic ability initially made me wary of this series. However, thankfully Martin has resisted the temptation of having Sophie have a convenient vision and voila! - crime solved. Actually there was one such moment, relating to a side plot, but I didn't mind that instance as I'd already figured it out for myself some time before without any psychic intervention!

Rather Sophie's visions help provide her with a better picture of the victim and the crime scene, and she combines this with the more usual profiler techniques to build a better picture, more quickly, of the perpetrator. She chose to transfer to a field office so she could make better use of her psychic abilities at crime scenes when the details are likely to be fresher and her visions stronger.

Alongside the main plot, the finalisation of the investigation from the previous book, THE MURDERERS' CLUB continues. I would recommend reading the earlier book before starting FAN MAIL as it contains significant spoilers. As we follow the course of the investigations, a lot of detail about investigative and forensic procedures is included and, while mostly interesting, it sometimes gets a bit tedious and has a tendency to slow down the story.

It takes a brave crime author to write a story about a serial killer murdering crime authors! But luckily Martin had no such qualms because FAN MAIL is good fast paced thriller with an interesting and unique character in Sophie.

I'm still struggling to make up my mind about L.A. Rex.  It paints a very grim picture of life in a deprived area of one of the  richest cities in one the most affluent country in the world .  The portrait painted by Beall of South Central Los Angeles reads more like a war zone from the third world country than an area of L.A. 

Everywhere you turn there is death and bloody violence.  The cops aren't much better than the bad guys are they supposed to be policing.  Every time you step out of your card, potential death awaits. Life is cheap in South Central. People can and do kill for one wrong glance. 

L.A. Rex reminded me of the writing of James Ellroy.  Intense, violent and peppered with slang - often incomprehensible.  The author makes no concessions for readers who aren't familiar with the life. 

Initially my interest was held by wondering how on earth do these men and women retain their sanity with the daily death and violence described in the book.   Then about half way through it started to lose me.  It seemed every time Ben and his partner rode out in their patrol car someone would be maimed or die - usually messilly and painfully. 

There were two time lines in the book: 10 years in the the past which gives  some of Ben's history and  his relationship with his  extremely unpleasant lawyer father and the current day which tells us the day to day story of life in the LAPD . There were so many peripheral characters popping in and out of the story; some appearing in both time lines, that it became a bit confusing.

It was a difficult book to read in many ways and I asked myself, was it worth it? I'm still not sure.  What I find myself thinking about after finishing L.A. REX  is the fact that the author is a serving LAPD Officer.  I can't help but wonder how much of the book reflects the true experience of Police Officers in South Central L.A.  If it is even a fraction of what police have to deal with, how on earth do they retain their sanity? Or do they?   I read an interview with the author who said that he kept a journal for a number of years and found he felt compelled to write  a book as the journal could no longer contain what he had to write. Perhaps this book was some sort of catharis for Beall. A way to purge himself of all the mindless violence and death he was witnessed.

What I've discovered that is haunting me is not the book itself, but the questions it raises. How such a third-world type situation where life is so cheap can exist side-by-side with such affluence in one of the most propserous nations on earth. Is it blindness on the part of the authorities?  Short-sighed self-interest from politicians who have no interest in investing the sort of level of funding needed to even make a dent in the problem? Not enough votes in it for them perhaps.  Are the different levels of society so cut off from one another that this problem remains unseen by the majority?  What has gone so wrong with the American Dream that it has come to this in some areas of the country?