Hello friends and fellow book bloggers! I am anticipating that this will be a LOOOOOONG post, so grab yourself a cup of tea and settle in.
I have recently read the first 3 books in the Hangman series by W.L.Knightly. I mistakenly thought there were only 3 books in the series, and there are actually more, but I’ve decided against continuing with the series, for reasons that I will explain below.
I’ve decided to write an overall review of the 3 books together and then a star rating of each book underneath.
I was really surprised when I saw this book was co written by two authors, and I thought I’d find it really easy to see the two different styles, but credit to these authors they were very similar and kept the flow of the book!
Without thinking too much while you were reading these books and just going with the flow, they were good. They had all the makings of a good crime thriller, with a really clever plot line to back it all up. The idea of corruption and injustice was really interesting and the way that played into the murders was like nothing I had read before.
But unfortunately once you delved deeper into the books, there were clear issues.
Namely, the way they wrote about women throughout the series and the way the female characters were portrayed were nothing short of horrendous. The men were degrading and the women were written to be treated like trash.
I also felt that they held back too much when it came to talking about the crimes and the crime scenes. They wanted these books to be thrilling but I found them to be too tame.
One thing I did enjoy was the chapters switching between characters, it kept the story fresh and offered different perspectives on the same situation. It also allowed us to see things from the Hangman’s perspective, and I love seeing things from the killers POV!
There were points at which it felt like the authors could have condensed the books into perhaps 2, that were a little bit longer, but cut out some of the crap that was there just to fill the space. So many times I found myself wanting to skim read or skip parts because they just weren’t relevant to the story and didn’t add any value.
And at the end of each book it said to be continued… Which bugged me no end. That is no way to finish a book, a chapter sure, but the whole book? Definitely not. It made the books seem cheap.
I made the decision not to continue with this series when we had had 3 books of the so called detectives trying to solve the case, being unable to and then the authors resorting to smut to try and fill the pages… I have no issue with smut, but it just didn’t the book at all and was pointless, an easy way to fill space.
On the whole, these books were good, but they just missed the mark for me. There was something missing and they didn’t quite have that grittiness that you come to expect from crime thrillers.
SILENT CRIME (Hangman #1)
Overall rating – 3 stars.
HIDDEN CRIME (Hangman #2)
Overall rating – 4 stars. I liked this one a little bit more than the other two. It was definitely the best of the series!
GUILTY CRIME (Hangman #3)
Overall rating – 2 stars.
Let me know if you’ve read this book series, and completed it and what you thought!
Until next time, Em xxx
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