Customer Reviews

The Wrong Man: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

John Katzenbach is arguably the master of the psychological thriller. There is plenty of objective evidence for that proposition: his novels have garnered two prestigious literary awards, not to mention a couple of Edgar nominations and a passel of movie adaptations. Each one of his works has been informed with an intellectual, learned voice while being grounded in a plausible, real-world foundation. The same --- and more --- can be said of THE WRONG MAN, Katzenbach's newest and best novel.

There are a number of factors that contribute to making THE WRONG MAN Katzenbach's most readable and accessible work to date, perfect in nearly every way. The plot is strong, riveting and terrifying, given its up close and personal manifestation of romantic obsession. A young woman named Ashley Freeman momentarily becomes involved with Michael O'Connell, a violent mass of contradictory loose ends and crossed wires who at the same time is possessed with a canny and savage intelligence. Ashley attempts to terminate the relationship, which O'Connell will not tolerate; he continues to pursue Ashley, both literally and figuratively.

Ashley's parents, divorced for several years and still struggling with the issues that ended their own relationship, mean well but are woefully ill-prepared to assist their daughter when she comes to them for help. Scott Freeman is a college professor whose street smarts do not extend much farther than the walls of his classroom. Sally Freeman-Richards is an attorney toiling at the low end of a divorce and real estate practice that requires little heavy physical or intellectual lifting other than by rote. Sally's relationship with Hope Frazier, her life partner, is fraying around the edges for reasons that neither woman is able to articulate or prevent. Sally's reliance on the rules and order of law is of little use when dealing with O'Connell, who uses and skirts the system with impunity. As Scott, Sally and Hope come together uneasily to develop and execute an effective plan to deal with the situation, they slowly begin to realize that the conventional order of their respective lives will not provide them with a solution.

The beauty of THE WRONG MAN, however, is not the implementation of their plan, or even how well or badly it works. While those factors would have been enough to create an engrossing story, what ultimately drives this tale at lightning speed from page to page is the quiet but electrifying interplay among the characters as they slowly work toward a common goal. As their individual and occasionally secretive plans threaten to inadvertently subvert it, O'Connell's coldly brilliant actions play havoc on each of their lives.

This is the perfect contemporary bogeyman story. People like O'Connell exist; as I write this, the news wires are reporting that a popular 19-year-old film and music starlet is taking action against a man whose behavior, as described, sounds uncannily like O'Connell's. THE WRONG MAN may be fiction, but it is all too real.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

John Katzenbach's "The Wrong Man" features a particularly nasty villain named Michael O'Connell. After having a one-night stand with lovely art student Ashley Freeman, O'Connell begins to stalk her relentlessly. When she tries to reason with him, he merely smirks and tells her that eventually she will understand that they are destined to be together. Ashley would prefer not to involve her family in her problems, but eventually her father Scott, a college history professor, and her mother, Sally, a lawyer, find out that Ashley is in serious trouble. They, along with Hope, Sally's lover, decide to put their heads together to come up with a plan to deal with O'Connell.

However, far from being a garden-variety stalker, O'Connell has some unique skills at his disposal. First, he is an expert computer hacker who uses his considerable ability to invade and disrupt the lives of people he despises. In addition, he seems to have little need of money, since instead of working, he spends many hours keeping tabs on Ashley. O'Connell is a sadist who arranges convenient "accidents" to punish people who, he fears, might be getting too close to Ashley. In fact, he is a master criminal who uses his brilliant mind to commit felonies without leaving behind any forensic evidence. Will Ashley ever regain the freedom to live her life without fear? Will she have to look over her shoulder indefinitely? After much soul searching, Ashley's parents come up with a way to fight back against this vicious individual who has robbed a vulnerable young woman of her innocence and peace of mind.

"The Wrong Man" had the potential to be a suspenseful and psychologically engaging thriller and it does have some genuinely chilling moments. However, at over four hundred and fifty pages, it is a bit too long and repetitious. O'Connell is a one-dimensional psychopath who is almost too bad to be true. In addition, Katzenbach uses a clumsy device that disrupts the narrative's flow. Throughout the book, the author inserts a series of intense conversations between an unknown woman and an unnamed writer. The woman, who is obviously an insider, for some reason feels the need to give a detailed account of the conflict between O'Connell and the Freemans to a total stranger. Instead of illuminating the story, however, these passages feel artificial and intrusive. In addition, the long-awaited conclusion is convoluted and unrealistic. If it had been more carefully constructed and edited, "The Wrong Man" could have been a more effective novel about the extremes to which ordinary people might be driven when seeking justice in an unjust world.

THE WRONG MAN is the first novel I've read by John Katzenbach. I thought it was a very effective thriiller. Katzenbach is plainly a very skilled writer and I thought he did a very good job building the tension. This is a good page-turner, albeit a slightly verbose one.

The plot of THE WRONG MAN concerns a stalker who grows increasingly violent, eventually threatening the family of the young woman he's obsessed with. This admittedly sounds like a very familiar plotline. Indeed, the first 350 pages of this novel are relatively predictable. However, for the last hundred pages, Katzenbach takes this plot into a direction that I did not expect. Eventually, the family hatches a remarkably convulted and unethical plan that I will not reveal here. I personally didn't find this plot development to be particularly credible at all -- I couldn't imagine such a plan working in the real world.

This is also a rather odd novel in that the three main characters are each experiencing a mid-life crisis. Katzenbach devotes a lot of prose to their inner thoughts and emotions -- too much time, in my opinion. I understand that Katzenbach is trying to make a point here about the emptiness of suburban, middle-class life, but this theme has been done to death. I eventually grew rather weary of these characters, who struck me as somewhat humorless and unhappy about their lives.

Overall, though, THE WRONG MAN is a good literary suspense novel. If you like this book, you might want to consider the work of Peter Abrahams and Joy Fielding, who write in a similar style.

In critiquing this book, I break the story into three distinct parts. The beginning of the story was both unsettling and riveting as the extent of Michael O'Connell's obsession was revealed. The writer insightfully portrays the initial reactions of the victims as they underestimate what they are up against.

The middle part of the book lagged a bit as the story simply reinforced what we already knew, that Ashley and her family were struggling with how to handle the situation.

Once they finalized a plan, however, the story picked up pace again, with suspense building page by page until a somewhat predictable, yet satisfying climax.

The writer expertly captures the seriousness and unpredictability of dealing with an obsessed and violent stalker. As explained throughout the book, going to the authorities is not always the optimal approach.

I didn't really care for the numerous switches to the 'present' through the eyes of the writer. While they added length, and a little mystery to the story, I don't feel they ultimately contributed much to the plot.

First of all, I love John Katzenbach as an author. I don't believe anybody writes psychothrillers quite like him. He is a master at weaving all the lines together so that the good guys have not so good sides and the bad guys have some soft edges of desparation in them. I didn't give this one five stars because it was almost too creepy and too visceral. It was hard to put down but more in the macabre sense instead of the compelling sense.

Ashley is being stalked by Michael; her father Scott is a professor, and her mother Sally, a lawyer. Also in the mix is Hope, Sally's partner whom she left Scott for.

From this promising start, things go rapidly downhill in terms of reader enjoyment. After four weeks, I'm barely at three-quarters the way through. It is so dreary, poorly-written, and the characters generally operating on a less-than-sentient level, that it is a real struggle to make progress. Katzenbach has to take credit for this: he is the author after all! But surely the publisher has an editor who can review the manuscript and address the more blatant errors? Who wants to read prose that is thick with "almost" and "almost as if", sometimes twice or more in a short paragraph. There are also instances where the writer has repeated himself, using two sentences in succession that have the same meaning. Take note Mr Katzenbach: tautology is not required in a novel.

Add to this the writer's unwillingness to "show" rather than "tell" - s/he thought/felt/believed/etc - and his apparent inability to write without liberal use of adverbs (count the number of words ending in "-ly"!) and you have a real mess that is perhaps the junk food of novels: looks and sounds good initially, but is thin on substance and nourishment, and ultimately leaves a discerning reader dissatisfied and eager for something better.

The characters tend to act without true credibility with the exception of Ashley. She, like many young adults will follow a parent's advice without too much in the way of questions, but she is drawn as something of a strong-minded and intelligent girl. Yet even she never thinks that the police are a good option in dealing with her stalker, and nor do any of the other characters. In this regard, the book fails, for the suspension of disbelief - essential for any piece of fiction - never takes place.

I don't specifically read for intellectual stimulation - I want to be entertained and taken into a different world with credible characters. I read for enjoyment, and Katzenbach's work provides very little of that.

Perhaps as a successful author, Katzenbach has become lazy, or his publisher is pressuring him for the sake of a few dollars. Regardless, this is a low-quality piece of writing in need of a good edit with uninteresting characters drawn badly and acting irrationally. The only redeeming quality I can find is that it is not as bad as the average Baldacci or Coben.

Faint praise, but hopefully not more than it deserves.

Addition on Feb 1:

Having completed the book, I now realize I was premature in regarding the work as merely being poorly-edited. It is far closer to a first draft by an unskilled writer than a completed work by someone who cares for their craft. The excessive use of adverbs - at times serially - grates, but I neglected to mention the method with which Katzenbach tries to stimulate tension: the use of the writer researching the circumstances of the book. I got sick to death at the end of each chapter of being "teased" with little or no information yielded.

The writing quality is truly poor, with run-on sentences, stock phrases, and cliches abounding. I picked-up a few phrases very similar to popular song lyrics, which is never appropriate. There are even times when the writer has used the wrong words. His attempts at creating images in the reader's mind fail. Whether this be due to a lack of skill or desire makes no different to the end result.

His research too is deficient: an event takes place where DNA evidence is recovered. As a retired forensic scientist, I am certain such evidence would have been destroyed by event in the story.

And in the end, when all is being revealed, there is a final dissatisfaction: the realization that the story, told through research and interview, gave much background information that would have been unavailable to anyone.

I shall never read a work by this author again.

Around 50 years ago, Alfred Hitchcock directed a movie called The Wrong Man, a based-on-real-events tale starring Henry Fonda as an innocent man accused of a robbery. John Katzenbach's novel may have the same name, but it is definitely not the same story: instead, it is about a stalker and the lives he affects.

Of course, tales of stalkers are not all that new, but Katzenbach is a good enough writer to make his book entertaining even if the premise has a been-there-done-that feel to it. At the beginning of the novel, graduate student Ashley Freeman has already had a one-night stand with Michael O'Connell. To her, it was a drunken fling, but to him, it's love, and now he won't leave her alone. The first scene with him gives a glimmer of this obsession, as he gets her initials tattooed on the bottom of his foot.

Soon Ashley realizes that Michael will not take no for an answer, and his attempts to win her love get more and more scary. Finally, she turns to family for help: her father Scott (a history professor), his ex-wife Sally (a lawyer) and Hope (a soccer coach), the woman Sally left Scott for. There's a lot of tension between the three (even Sally and Hope are having relationship problems), but they will push this aside to deal with Michael.

The problem is, Michael can't be dealt with. Bribery doesn't work, nor do threats. Michael is not only determined, he's very clever, and he targets Scott, Sally and Hope as well, using his computer skills to frame them for crimes. Finally, they come to a reluctant conclusion: there is no legal means to stop Michael, which means they will need to act outside the law. Simply killing him is not the answer, however, as it could back to get them locked up, so an alternative is required.

While the plot has been done before, what makes this book stand out is Katzenbach's writing.. Generally speaking, Katzenbach's best books are the ones that have a good villain, and Michael O'Connell definitely fits that bill. If you enjoy thrillers, The Wrong Man is the right book.

What do you do with a Stalker like this one? Where do you go? How do you hide? We hear this kind of stories in the news all the time, but...have we lived them? This book will make you live one.

It keeps tension in the reading which is a great quality of John Katzenbach. When the first page is turned, the action begins and the feeling of helplessness is felt through out the whole book.

If you like novels with action, and that will make you take the book wherever you are, this is one of them.

this writers idea is a good one and could have been very exciting. the problem is the book is much to slow and too long. it is wearing me out! ive even skipped forward some and its like a soap opera; i havent missed a single word! i started reading it in may 2011 and am still trying to finish. ive read quite a few books since i started the wrong man. my friend went ahead and skipped to the ending. im trying to hold on!

I have read everything John Katzenbach has written, and most of his novels, especially Hart's War, are fantastic. I could not wait to finish this one, and I don't mean that in a good way. I didn't care much about the characters except for Ashley. I'm not sure what was missing, but I just wanted to find out how everything ended. Even that left me a little disappointed. As other reviewers have pointed out, this could have been greatly edited. I would recommend reading any of Katzenbach's other work.