Reviewed by DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


TODD RITTER – Death Notice. St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books, hardcover, October 2010.

TODD RITTER Death Notice

    Though the serial killer novel has been done to death and beyond, it’s still nice to see one take a different tack and do it successfully.

    Death Notice is a mystery/suspense entry set in Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania, where Police Chief Kat Campbell is raising her son and settling in for the quiet life — until two crimes strike — someone has stolen the local florist’s delivery van (“Perry Hollow was the kind of town where you could park a car and leave the keys in the ignition and know it would be safe. Until now.”) and someone has left a coffin on the side of the road … and not an empty one.

    The coffin turns out to have a body of a local man in it, murdered in a gruesome manner, and when Henry Goll, who does the obituaries for the local paper, reports he received a death notice for the victim before the man was murdered, the state police show up in the person of Nick Donnelly.

    Donnelly is the head of a task force assigned to track down the serial killer known as the “Betsy Ross Killer” because he embalms his victims alive and sews their lips shut while they are still breathing in the manner of the Perry Hollow victim.

    A second death notice arrives and then a second victim in Perry Hollow, but when the Betsy Ross Killer is caught, there is yet another murder in Perry Hollow.

    Strange as it seemed, she had been hoping it was the work of Betsy Ross. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

    Kat has her own personal serial killer on her hands, and it is someone she knows. Before it is over, the whole town will be in terror and Kat and her son in particular, while Donnelly finds his life and career in jeopardy, and Henry Goll discovers he is more than merely the messenger where these killings are concerned..

    Anyone who has ever worked for a small town paper or written obituaries will appreciate the insiders view of the job from a journalist for the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

    My only caveat is that since Ritter points out in the book that the first line of any obit is known in the business as “the Death Sentence,” that should have been his title. A minor complaint, and likely imposed by an editor or a publisher instead of the writer.

    The setting and setup may be cozy, but there is nothing cozy about this well written and twisty suspense novel that uses many of the tropes of the serial killer novel and the cozy, while creating an atmosphere of dread and terror counter balanced by good police procedure and likable well drawn characters (hopefully we will see more of Kat and Nick).

    Ritter manages the whole small town milieu without resorting to eccentrics or “characters,” which alone is enough to set him apart, and handles the grue and gore without falling into the trap of exploitation or reveling in them in the semi-pornographic manner of many better known writers in the field. His prose has the journalistic virtues of being crisp, analytical, and controlled.

    I didn’t buy the killer’s motive or reasoning completely, but Ritter handles it all with skill and a bit of panache so I am more than willing to give him this small conceit for the sake of an entertaining read.

    A new writer to watch, a good book with a well drawn setting and well drawn characters, and something a bit different in the over crowded serial killer field gets this one the highest of recommendations.