Killer’s Diary

By Brian Pinkerton

There’s this coffee shop, and this girl. She’s a nice girl, a lonely girl with a past full of baggage and insecurity enough for an Olympic pity squad…she drinks coffee at the coffee shop. As many lonely people do - she finds solace in books and ends up eventually working as a clerk in a book store. Along the way, she finds a notebook.

“Killer’s Diary” is a difficult book to pigeonhole. It’s a mystery, to be sure, because there are clues throughout it and you don’t find out what you missed until the ending. It’s sort of a thriller, because it’s written in the style of a thriller, except in most thrillers you know who the bad guy is, and you are just waiting to see how fast the train will be going when the good and bad finally collide. It’s a romance too…and a coming of age story. It has violence and bloodshed, but it doesn’t hinge on these elements, any more than it hinges on any of the others I’ve mentioned.

What author Brian Pinkerton has done is to smoothly meld his story across genres, running it down several twisting alleys along the way and managing, somehow, to have those alleys open back up onto the same street to converge in a very tight, very satisfying ending. I won’t tell you if it’s a happy ending, a tragic ending, or much else about the ending, except that it ties the book up in a neat package and delivers.

Pinkerton’s prose is smooth. His strength is in the believable building blocks he uses to mold his characters. There is a feeling of being cut off from the real world - not much interaction with the city, the authorities, or even fringe characters. There’s a taste of this, but it almost has the feel of the author’s impatience to get back to the characters and elements that matter. The style is heavily narrative, but not tedious…

The plot centers on the notebook that the protagonist, Ellen, finds in the coffee shop. At first it appears to reveal a kindred spirit - lonely, set apart and heavy with early-life angst. By the time she has finished reading it…a different story emerges. A different character pokes his head into the mix…and her past catches up to her. Nothing is quite as it seems - no one is exactly who you thought they were.

“Killer’s Diary” is a first rate book, lavishly illustrated and with a brilliant cover by Zach McCain. This book is available now for preorder from The Full Moon Press. You can find the book at a slight discount at THE HORROR MALL - or by clicking the cover art above. VERY highly recommended.

–DNW