Customer Reviews

The Confession (Hard Case Crime)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a truly outstanding noir mystery and completely deserves the Edgar. Layered, psychological, twisted, scary and perfect in every way. One of those rare and totally satisfying mysteries that also can be read on a whole new level once you know how it ends, so you will want to read again immediately after finishing it. I was amazed at how perfect it was in every way.

It's hard to review this book without giving away the twist that really makes it fantastic. If you have read some of the other reviews or are familiar with noir themes, you may have figured it out already, but boy, is it done well! This is a very psychological book, and I will just say that the twist comes into play a bit before the halfway point (or maybe earlier, if you are more perceptive than me) when the reader realizes that all is not as it seems. Then, what starts out as a pretty formulaic (but still very well-written!) detective novel becomes increasingly unique and interesting.

This novel, like a lot of good noir films (and books for that matter), starts out a little slow and builds to a fantastic, dramatic crescendo. Yes, it's dark, but it's also great. Intelligent, psychological, twisted, and a perfect ending. Extremely well-written and satisfying. My favorite Hard Case Crime book yet by far, The Confession is unique and not to be missed.

Jake Danser is in a hell of a fix. His wife Elizabeth has found out about his mistress Sara and wants a divorce. Sara wants a commitment but Jake want to save his marriage. In the meantime, Elizabeth has taken up with local prosecutor Minor Robinson during the separation. When Sara is found strangled with a tie very similar to Jake's own, he becomes the prime suspect and Robinson is determined to prove him guilty. Could he be guilty? Well, he does have this disorder where he blacks out for periods of time...

Author Domenic Stansberry successfully utilizes the "confessional" style made most famous by Edgar Allan Poe is such tales as "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." Luckily, Danser does not deluge us with the same multiple protestations regarding his samity as Poe's protagonists did. Stansberry's skillful prose style also lends a level of credence to The Confession, which is essentially a "didhedoit" where the lead character seems often as clueless as the readers.

Danser tells his own story, ten years after, so at the very least, we know he's not dead, but we don't know where he's telling it from (I had assumed it was prison). The confessional style works well for this tale of a man who doesn't seem entirely sure of his own innocence, keeping the all-important doubt in the reader's mind all the way through this highly suspenseful novel. It's easy to see how Stansberry was nominated for two previous Edgar Allan Poe awards: he really knows his way around the psychological crime genre.

The cover, by artist Richard B. Farrell (using his own hands and his wife as models), again represents the inside contents well. The title of the book would seem to give away the ending, but any mention of the ending at all is bound to be a giveaway of some sort. I'll just say, in the sensationalistic style of publishing blurbs everywhere (it doesn't seem entirely inappropriate for this line): "I confess! I was astounded by The Confession."

One of the things I miss the most about the late 1950s and early 1960s is the way one shopped for paperback novels. Nothing --- well, almost nothing --- could top the excitement of walking into a drugstore or supermarket and checking out the revolving wire racks of paperbacks that were always present. Space was tight, and the harried clerks often would stick two or three different titles in one slot, so that you had to flip back through the books in each slot to see what was there. My favorites, even then, were the detective novels. There was a rough edge to the books; they had covers that more often than not were described as garish, which of course made them all the more appealing. And, contrary to the ancient adage, you most certainly could judge the book by its cover. Mickey Spillane was the king, but there were a bunch of other guys working in the genre as well --- authors like Carter Brown and Donald Hamilton, characters like Shell Scott and Matt Helm, and publishers like Gold Medal and Pyramid. They slowly disappeared, and the paperback market since has been relatively tame. Until now.

Hard Case Crime began publishing in late 2004, and, for those of us who like our murder mysteries served up spicy and hard-boiled, this mass market paperback imprint is an absolute, unrelenting total joy, a not-so-guilty pleasure to be devoured by the page --- and bookful. THE CONFESSION by Domenic Stansberry is a prime example of what Hard Case does, and does so well. Stansberry is a hard-hitting, uncompromising writer; those seeking happy, conventional endings where good and evil are clearly defined and the white hats triumph should look elsewhere. THE CONFESSION is an excellent example of this.

THE CONFESSION is told through the eyes and voice of Jake Danser, a forensic psychologist for Marin County. From the opening page of this dark, brooding novel, one immediately gets the impression that all is not right with Danser. He is caught between two women. Elizabeth is his beautiful, wealthy wife, a psychologist like himself and some years his senior. Danser genuinely seems to love Elizabeth, to the extent that he is capable of the same, yet he has sought solace in the arms of another. Sara Johnson is a criminal attorney some ten years his junior who also is romantically involved with another, and who is pressuring Danser to make a decision regarding his wife.

Danser also is besieged on a professional level, having been called as an expert witness in the Mori trial, a high-profile murder case involving a man accused in the strangulation death of his wife. The defense is being mishandled by the attorney, and Danser risks being held up to ridicule by the district attorney who, as it happens, used to have a relationship with Elizabeth. Matters come to a head when Elizabeth, who has been brooding for months, discovers Danser's infidelity and throws him out of the house. The crowning blow, however, occurs when Danser is accused of a brutal murder that he insists he did not commit. He contends that he is being set up and thinks he knows who is doing it. But knowing and proving are two different things, and Danser is forced to take matters into his own hands...with surprising and frightening results.

As I write these words, THE CONFESSION has just received the 2005 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. What more need be said? This is a masterful novel by a (heretofore) underappreciated master of the genre. Very highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

I can take an unrelentingly grim and/or dark character in my mysteries, but such characters are easier to take when there are a few positive/brighter characters stirred into the mix, too. I won't reveal too much in this review, but here the entire story is told by a character who, in addition to emotionally and sexually abusing his wife on a regular basis, may be responsible for one murder or several murders.

This is one of those stories told entirely from the perspective of one character, a character whose narration may not be entirely trustworthy. Actually, to be more accurate, the author's story is more subtle and skillful than that: the narrator is actually entirely trustworthy, but one has to read very closely and, more importantly, in between the lines to get the whole story the narrator is telling us.

Still, you have to be able to get into a good, grim crime story involving dark obsessions or you probably won't enjoy this novel very much. I can take stories like this occasionally, but after reading "The Confession", I'm ready for a regular run-of-the-mill mystery featuring a wise-cracking detective trying to solve a routine murder case.

But, make no mistake, if you're in the mood for this sort of thing, Mr. Stansberry is the real deal. I'll definitely read something of his again... after I take a bit of a break after reading this story.

I have heard a lot of people call this "a gripping Mystery." However, the author all but tells you the answer in the first fifty pages. Then he tries to throw you off in the last fifty. He does it by shifting the focus and saying; if this were not first person you wouldn't know how things are going.

The narrator is very obviously unreliable. Due to his obvious lack of honesty the book ends up twisting in the wind looking for a way to be interesting and fails. It seems like psychology is supposed to be what draws the reader in. To that end, there is an attempt at deep psychological self-analysis. All of the analysis ends up feeling superficial. The analysis feels like it came from a single afternoon of research. It doesn't feel like several years of education or expert knowledge. The psychological hypothesizing actually works against the story in a very real way.

Also, as many others have said, the ending is horrid. The epilogue really seems to serve very little purpose. It reinforces what we already know and does very little to add anything to the story. The ending may have been intended to make the reader uneasy and strike a note of fear. In my opinion it felt a lot like filler used to stretch the word count.

I must admit that Stansberry did a good job of fulfilling the character. The dialogue and word choice is highly fitting. Stansberry's description of events and locations stay firmly in character. Also the character's actions seem to be logical for his personality. Stansberry allowed the protagonist to tell his story and kept his own voice nearly muted. Such self-censoring is something not seen often enough in modern literature. For that reason alone I give the story a two star rating.

If all pulp was like this I would read it all the time. But it's not. This was so well written that even though I knew I was being led down the Roger Ackroyd path, I happily let Dominic Stansberry take me there. What a wonderful writer! I bought this because I really couldn't imagine an Edgar winning pulp. Now I can and I want Dominic Stansberry to hurry up and write more.

Jake Danser has two huge problems. The first is that he's a bit of a jerk who has a full blown madonna complex regarding his wife. The second is that his sweet but not particularly bright young girlfriend has been strangled and all the evidence points towards him. Jake's life --- a successful career, a rich, beautiful although cold wife, and a fabulous home all flitter from his grasp and his only hope is find the real killer.

The book starts slowly but it's a sneaky slowness. Domenic Stansberry carefully lays out the mess that is Jake's life. Bit by tantalizing bit the reader gets the feeling that a lot of people are waiting for Jake to slip up. Jake has been asking for trouble for a long time and yet, it's a shock to see how hard fate smacks him down.

This is a tough litte book and it reads like it was published back in the orginal hard core pulp era. The tension builds slowly and remains feverishly high right up to the end. It's very, very good.

The Confession is narrated by Jake Danser, a Marin County forensic psychologist who may or may not be a homicidal maniac himself. Danser is a womanizing charmer whose profession places him squarely at the nexus of criminal justice and psychopathology. A profession he may well have chosen as a reaction to his own psychosexual demons. Much as a compulsive firebug or arsonist might choose to join his community's volunteer fire department.

The remarkable thing about this book is the way in which various facts about Jake's biography are tantalizingly introduced throughout the course of the narrative. Each new bit of information serves to flesh out Jake's profile until it fits perfectly with that of the type of criminal who kills for pleasure or gratification.

The Confession is head and shoulders above the usual entry in the crowded crime novel genre because of its superb attention to nuance and its intricately layered content. Highly recommended.

"The impulse is in all of us. The reasonable person, he tunes it out. He shuts it off. It's a matter of will."

Reading The Confession, we follow the narrator in a darkness which is rarely explored, a dark pit from which the work never emerges. Finally the reader, disoriented, is abandoned to find his way back to the reality we prefer, a world of rules, perhaps loose, perhaps marginally defined, but nevertheless necessary for survival. Here the reader is thrown at the mercy of the narration, carried along past the fragile boundary of these rules, into the black chaos which is more easily ignored.

Those who practice evil are generally vilified, written off as deviants, "the other". Yet don't we each have within ourselves the capacity for evil? A darkness, suppressed, which given the circumstances, could emerge? It's important to visit that suppressed self, to identify it so that it can be kept in check, to not ignore the chaos, but to confront it. This is the brilliance of Stansberry's work. This is why you should read "The Confession".

Sure, Domenic Stansberry had his book THE CONFESSION published under the HARD CASE CRIME banner. That doesn't mean this feels anything like the crime pulp novel it claims to be.

It's a psychological thriller (a fairly unoriginal one at that) and extremely dark. I felt sort of glad when I was through with it just because I knew that after I read it once I wouldn't have to really return to it again unless I was in the mood to read passage after passage of some guy rambling on about the psyche and how it can make you go crazy sometimes.

Sort of self-indulgent and pretentious at times, but has it's moments.