Book Review: Wounded Prey by Sean Lynch

Finished May 11, 2014

Synopsis on Good Reads

“It’s time to finish what he started…”

A young girl is snatched in broad daylight from outside her school and later found brutally murdered and hanging from a tree.

When recently retired San Francisco Police Inspector, Bob Farrell, sees this on the news, he realises his worst nightmare has just come true. The same brutal killer a government agency stopped him from putting away twenty years before is once more on the loose.

As the killer wreaks a trail of blood and destruction across North America, Bob Farrell sets out to track him down.

But Farrell’s not playing by the rules any more than the killer is, and soon the FBI have both of them in their sights…


My review on Good Reads
2.5 of 5 Stars

This was the book that introduces the duo of Detectives Farrell and Kerns. The book begins in Iowa in 1987 in December and it includes a full-fledged blizzard. It starts with the unthinkable; a child abduction in broad daylight at a school and a young off-duty cop who answers the screams of distress.

It’s a decent story with ties to killer dating back to the Viet Nam war and attempted rehabilitation upon the return home and goes on to a hospital release that spawns horrific serial child abductions and killings. While my taste definitely does run in the direction of government/police dramas and tracking and ultimately ending a serial killers reign, this book was too graphic for my taste. It wasn’t graphic in the abduction or abuse of children, but it was graphic in the injuries and ways the adults involved die. Normally that would be preferable to any detail about abusing children, but I didn’t need a detailed enough description of gangrene that I could almost smell it more than once. Exactly how an infection looks, smells and progresses is not something I need to read and think about 3 or 4 times.

My greatest issues with the book were too many stereotypes from the chain-smoking alcoholic retired cop to the inept FBI agents and the deranged ex-military. The book was also too long. The killer escaped death about two too many times making him look like a super-villain and the heroes just not sharp enough to keep it from being almost dark comedy. When I got to the last 30 pages or so, I was just trying to finish it because I‘d already been ready for the book to end for a while. I won’t be reading anymore in the series.