A Small Town by Thomas Perry

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on December 17, 2019

A Small Town is a vigilante story. To make vigilantism seem justified, thriller writers concoct dastardly crimes committed by evil villains so that readers will root for the vigilantes. In the logic of thrillerworld, if bad guys are bad enough, it’s okay for good guys to murder them. It isn’t surprising that Thomas Perry made one of the killers a psychotic racist cult leader because even liberals would agree that it is morally correct to murder a racist, right? Wrong. The protagonist’s stunning hypocrisy might make her an interesting character if her character flaws were recognized and explored, but Perry wants the reader to cheer on a serial killer who never pauses to consider whether being a serial killer might be morally blameworthy. I just can't root for shallow protagonists.

The bad guys in this story are federal prisoners who commit an improbable escape, killing a bunch of corrections officers and arming themselves in the process. Mind you, this is a minimum-to-medium security prison, the kind that houses tax evaders and people who commit credit card fraud, but we’re told that hardcore criminals were transferred there because more secure prisons were overcrowded. It isn’t clear that the hardcore criminals even committed federal crimes (murder is usually a state crime), but put that aside. Violent criminals with years left to serve don’t get sent to a federal prison with a low security level, even at the request of a blackmailed Bureau of Prisons bureaucrat, making the premise hard to swallow. But the setup isn’t nearly as difficult to buy into as the plot that follows.

In the two years since the prison break, the FBI hasn’t managed to find any of the twelve worst bad guys (perhaps not surprising since that duty would primarily fall upon the U.S. Marshals). Our hero, a detective named Kate, decides to resign from her small-town cop job so she can track down the twelve escapees and go full vigilante on them. Can this plucky small-town cop succeed where federal agents cannot? You know that answer to that question. In fact, she manages to find them rather easily and dispatches them without working up a sweat. The feds were apparently too dim to consider some of the obvious steps she takes to find the killers.

Kate takes the crime spree personally because her lover (married to a woman with MS so we’re supposed to forgive him for having an affair) was a casualty of the bad guys. That’s one of many contrivances designed to manipulate the reader into cheering for Kate despite her decision to betray everything a law enforcement officer should believe in by becoming a serial killer. I didn’t find either her cause or her character to be noble.

Apart from being a serial killer, Kate carries an illegal “numberless Glock” with an illegal “silencer screwed on.” Where does she get her illegal weaponry? More importantly, why does a police officer who should be dedicated to arresting people who violate firearms laws feel no qualms about violating them herself? The moral seems to be that if you think you have a good justification to break the law, it’s just fine to do so. The prisoners probably felt justified in escaping, but Kate believes her justification is superior to theirs. The prisoners and Kate are both wrong. We are a country of laws precisely to prevent people like Kate from becoming their own law.

Even less believable is that Kate’s quest is funded by the mayor and city council members who redirect a crime fighting grant to her personal use. I found it hard to swallow that so many people, even in a small town where leaders tend to be like-minded, would willingly conspire to commit federal and state felonies by misusing a federal grant to fund a contract killer. The mind simply boggles.

A vigilante novel needs to do something special to earn my recommendation. Perry has never been a gifted wordsmith, although he sometimes tells a good story. A Small Town does nothing to overcome its shallow premise. The narrative suffers from redundancy, as the reader is frequently reminded just how awful the criminals are, how much they deserve to die, and how the small town suffered in the aftermath of the violent prison break. The sentences devoted to those topics are an exercise in tedium. A good bit of the novel reads like padding, as Perry supplies mundane details that do nothing to create atmosphere or advance the plot.

I was amused by some of the novel’s observations, including a character’s realization after dedicating eight years to a religious cult that all he had to show for it was “a marginal life in the woods.” But the novel’s few moments of entertainment fail to offset a dull and predictable story about a remarkably hypocritical character.

NOT RECOMMENDED