Customer Reviews

Hanged Man

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The Hanged Man is worth a read if you are an avid mystery fan. But it is not the greatest book you will ever read.

One of the strong points of The Hanged Man is the setting. Walter Satterthwait does a good job of grounding his novel in Sante Fe; he makes the setting come alive. He also provides enough compelling scenes to keep the pages turning. There is, for instance, a chase scene on a mountain road that is particularly good. Few mystery fans will find themselves bored by The Hanged Man.

Other elements of the story are not as strong.

The story is basic and unimaginative. Essentially, a group of people spends the night in a house; someone murders one of the group. The rest of the book attempts to unravel the mystery. Satterthwait makes a stab at a twist ending, but it seems contrived and completely unbelievable.

The characters are the weakest element of The Hanged Man. Satterthwait has no apparent ability to make his protagonists come alive for the reader; the characters lack depth, so you are always aware that you are reading a novel. Most of the suspects in the murder are caricatures of New Age devotees; Satterthwait encourages you to look down at each of them. Moreover, the protagonists in the Hanged Man often behave in ways that are not entirely believable; for instance, one character chooses to leave Sante Fe to go on a shopping trip the morning after someone sends her boyfriend to the hospital in a failed murder attempt. (To be fair, Satterthwait tries to explain this behavior later in the book, but I still found this part of the story unconvincing).

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Hanged Man is that the private eye, Joshua Croft, is pompous and unlikeable. Croft smugly condescends to everyone he meets and the reader, clearly, is supposed to share the same attitude. At one point in The Hanged Man, Croft becomes involved in a fight; I realized, to my surprise, that I wanted the other guy to win. I read an interview in which Satterthwait said that he chose not to continue with the Croft series, in part, due to disappointing sales. A likeable private eye might have made these books sell a bit better.

The Hanged Man is not bad, but it is far inferior to the best mystery novels.