JA Konrath is a well-known and popular man among would-be and established writers for his always fascinating observations and advice regarding the harsh world of writing, publishing and self-promotion. I felt as if I knew him slightly before my purchase of this, his first novel, and I hope that my experience of him has not coloured my impressions and opinions in this review.
It's a pretty short story, I feel, and one that had the potential to have been much longer. My small paperback edition covers 276 pages and although I'm not usually a fast reader I polished this off in a single weekend. It's the story of a Chicago serial killer known as The Gingerbread Man, someone who has killed many people before the narrative begins and now, over the course of a few days, plans to torture and kill four specific women for reasons that are not revealed until the end. Heading that mission of discovery is Lieutenant Jacqueline `Jack' Daniels backed up with her relentlessly hungry partner Herb Benedict. The narrative surrounding the female protagonist Daniels is told in the first-person perspective (something I took a while getting used to given that I knew the author to be male) interspersed with occasional updates from the Gingerbread Man told from a third-person point of view. It's very formulaic but entertaining nevertheless, swinging from quite graphically violent imagery one minute to witty one-liners the next. In fact, although some of the jokes were familiar (e.g. "everybody hates an asshole, until it's time to take a dump") I was left with the impression that Konrath is more naturally a comedian than a teller of dark tales of murder and justice. The emphasis in Whiskey Sour is clearly on the serious side of killers and the pursuit of, but I sense that this author could have more success if he were to focus on what he probably prefers instinctively, which is to make razor-sharp witticisms and glib remarks. Other writers such as Mark Billingham, who was a stand-up comedian before he went into full-time writing with his DI Thorne series, manages to be very economical with his written humour, while others such as John Connolly uses a specific character (Louis) in his Bird series as an outlet for the wisecracks. Konrath on the other hand will allow most of the characters to have funny lines and as a result the overall `mood' of the novel is a slightly curious mixture of widespread jokes amid brutal savagery. I say curious because it seemed a little odd to be smiling as often as I was - the jokes are almost always funny - during such a sadistic tale of evil and murder.
Perhaps it's these lighter moments that help to make up for the lightness of the forensic, procedural and other technical details that usually go with a serial killer/detective story. Of course every writer has his or her own style, and JA Konrath's has to be a witty one and a likeable one for that, but it does seem to conflict with the darkness of the story as a whole. I enjoyed it though, and feel comfortable in recommending it to others.
