AN intense feeling of deja vu. Could I possibly have read this novel before? Then the realisation sets in that it is a sequel to the same author's The Stalker's Apprentice same anti hero, same Svengali figure manipulating him, same Joe Ortonesque Police Inspector. And a reprise of the plot? Just about.
Marcus Walwyn, in the earlier book, is the rich, bored young man who becomes fixated on waitress Karen, to the point of doing in her girl and boyfriends. He is guided in his nefarious purpose by an unpublished manuscript written by the Peter Lorrelike Kranze, who is also known as Zanker. The treatise is entitled "A Letter from Chile" and begins with the sentence. From the moment I could think reasonably [sic] I knew I would kill somebody".
Marcus is pursued and finally caught by Inspector Pirt, an eccentric policeman who operates outside the realm of the usual security procedures. The fact that Karen is also slaughtered hangs the final nail into his coffin, even though it wasn't Marcus but rather Kranze who committed the foul deed.
When the follow on begins, Marcus is in jail, but he is speedily released on foot of a technicality what it is, we are never told. He goes to live with his mother a female, never ageing Dorian Grey and her lover, one Harry Rutherford, the lawyer who defended him. He gets his old job in a publishing house back, his BMW car and all the money he inherited from his father, a wealthy doctor who hanged himself.
Back with the good life, he is dismayed one evening to find the creepy Inspector Birt lurking on his doorstep. Will he help the good Inspector to ensnare, capture and imprison his nemesis, Kranze alias Zanker? Of course he will. Otherwise there'll be no three hundred page plus novel, will there?
The process of entrapping Kranze then becomes rather involved, as Marcus sets out to find the man, John Speed, to whom "A Letter from Chile" is dedicated. He turns out to be a Scotsman named John Farrell, a down and out with smelly feet whom Marcus takes home and installs in his mother's bedroom she having decamped to get married to useful old Harry.
Farrell makes a miraculous recovery from slobbering ingrate to grateful lodger, cooks the morning porridge, and assures Marcus that he will kill Kranze for him. All he has to do is give him the word. Much too simple a scenario for the conniving Marcus, however. He decides that a trial run has to be undertaken, and to that purpose he stage manages the acquaintanceship of a waitress from Fortnum and Mason's named Miranda.
Used primarily, I suspect, to pad out the plot, this intrusion by cannon fodder Miranda ends when she is knocked down and killed by a car. But her friend Charlotte, a nurse, will do just as well, and she is taken home and summarily dispatched by the knife wielding Farrell. Nothing like a bit of practice to get the hand in.
Mr Power, being a master of the wince making factor, then has Farrell do the job on Kranze, Marcus perform the same on Farrell, and Birt amble along to throw the squeeze on Marcus. Lo and behold, our hero then ends up back in jail, but intimations of further episodes in the saga seep through on the final page when Marcus announces. "I was totally and utterly convinced that if I could just cajole Harry (with the odd shove and push from Ma, of course) into defending me yet again, I would walk free.
Please, Mr Power, don't do it. Move on to something else. If I have to endure another long, rambling discourse by whining Marcus, the book will become my "Letter from Chile" and I'll set out, knife in hand, with life imitating art.
