Customer Reviews

Sawbones (Most Wanted)

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Sawbones is a serial killer who keeps kidnapping young women, then cuts off their arms and legs while they are still alive. He hasn't been caught in three years. But then he makes the mistake of kidnapping Laura, the daughter of a crime boss. Her loving father sends some of his most ruthless henchmen after the killer. They don't stop at anything to find him and Laura - neither the FBI, nor state police and witnesses are safe from murder and torture...

This book has the kind of very dark humour you find in the film Reservoir Dogs and the like. I found it both chilling and very funny at the same time. It's definitely unusual. As the narrator says while they're driving around with a corpse and a policeman in the trunk: And this time we're the good guys. And they are, compared to the serial killer, so having someone like that hunted by ruthless criminals is very satisfying and fun.
The book has been criticized for being rather expensive while it's also quite short. That much is true. The publisher aims at people with dyslexia and other problems with reading: It's short, the printing is large, so is the space between lines. It's a really short book, a novella or short novel. To me it's still worth every penny and I would definitely recommend it. But as I wrote in the title: It's definitely not for the faint-hearted because it's extremely brutal and there's no relief from a world full of torture and murder. But with the dark humour mixed into this, it's still fun and definitely entertaining.

"Novella" is a fancy way to dress up what is merely a short story. Regardless of the number of pages, it can be finished in about 45 minutes. Anything that can be read that fast is just a short story, as far as I'm concerned. A fun read, but you may feel short-changed.

Friendly warning: This is a novella, at most, masquerading as a novel. It's not 160 pages as claimed; it's 114. In very large type. And, though it's a well written and engaging novella, a first-person narrative in the voice of a low-level New York mobster, because it's a U.K. publication it has not been copy-edited to weed out Scottishisms and seed in Americanisms: "tarmac" "damn all to smile about" "licence" "kerb" -- problematic for the American reader, who knows better. But I'm mostly cheesed off about how much I paid for this very short, lightweight read.