About The Book
One devastating crime. Four troubled suspects. And a vibrant, powerful journey inside the mind of nameless, faceless evil.
A mass shooting at a Chicago beach leaves several dead and dozens injured. In the year before the crime, four individuals emerge as possible suspects.
An apathetic computer programmer.
An ex-college athlete with a history of head injuries.
An Army veteran turned Chicago cop.
A despondent high school student.
One of them is the shooter. Discover who and why.
My Review
With thanks to the author for the copy received. I read a lot of crime fiction and sometimes the theme seems common. I had a feeling that Parabellum would be different to anything I had read before and I wasn’t disappointed, it was definitely original.
It concerns a mass murder and there are four suspects who the reader gets to know more about throughout the novel. You discover a lot, but the very last thing to be revealed is their name. All the way through they were described as the student, veteran, programmer or ex- athlete. Everybody they know is also described by their identity, whether it be therapist, classmate, partner or colleague. The only people whose identity was revealed immediately were the victims. This worked surprisingly well and I felt it was because the author wanted to show that so many people are invisible or forgettable.
All four suspects have different issues and I felt varying degrees of sympathy for them. One of them in particular I had a lot of sympathy for and I was desperately hoping that they wouldn’t be the killer. The other three I struggled to connect with more, even though I could understand their issues.
The final pages of the novel are chilling. The way the author describes all of the victims and their lives in just a few pages showed the strength of the writing and I’m still thinking about them days after finishing.
It certainly isn’t an easy or quick read, I found I needed silence to appreciate it. But, it is definitely a book I recommend.
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