If it bleeds, it leads…

Eve is a crime reporter for iWitness News, and in her zeal for getting scoops has found herself getting the attention of a serial killer with a penchant for staging very public and gruesome ‘exhibitions’. Juggling caring for her father, who has dementia, with her job, Eve is soon drawn into the killer’s game, putting her ethics on the back burner and giving him the airtime he craves, while  putting herself into more and more danger as the ‘game’ progresses. Death wants to claim his maiden, and the maiden just might let him…

A fairly decent thriller, this was incredibly easy to read, while Eve’s job allows her to make the sort of bad decisions that would make any other character Too Stupid To Live. It was also easy to see how the stress of caring for her father – which was pretty well realised – would affect her decision-making, and I enjoyed the fact that each of the killer’s victims were given life on the page before being struck down, making them more than just random bodies. That said, some of the peripheral characters, like Eve’s boss Ross and her main rival, Gus, were rather more cartoonish characters who seemed to have been put there simply to add to Eve’s stress levels and to give her an excuse for her lack of ethics.

Beautiful Dead provided a fictional break from my recent true crime binge and probably suffered a little for it, as the true stories I’ve been reading and watching are far more terrifying than what has been thought up here, but it would make for a decent beach read.