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The Jigsaw Man:
A Novel
by Nadine Matheson
c.2021, Hanover Square Press
$27.99 / $34.99 Canada
496 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
Finders Keepers.
It's all yours now, that cool, unique, surprise thing that
suddenly turned up and you laid claim to it. What once was
lost is yours now. Finders keepers, except, as in the new
novel The Jigsaw Man by Nadine Matheson,
what's found is a dead body.
Looking as though it was about to pay attention, the male
torso sat nicely upright against the rocks near the
Greenwich Pier. Nicely, if that can be said about a
headless, limbless body found along the murky water by a
young student. Not so nicely, if you were Detective
Inspector Anjelica Henley, who'd been given this case on her
first day back to work after being on leave for a PTSD-inducing
trauma of her own and was immediately assigned a rookie,
Trainee Detective Salim Ramouter, as partner.
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But one disarticulated, mutilated body became two in short
order, both victims found by the river and both, as it
turned out, were romantically tied in life.
In death, there was another tie: Henley and Ramouter
instantly realized that these new crimes had a lot in common
with another set of cases. Peter Olivier, who'd called
himself "The Jigsaw Man," had killed and dismembered a
number of people years before, and there were similarities
between his crimes and the new cases. Problem was, Olivier
had been in prison for two years, and murderous habits he
practiced (but that were not made public) seemed to have
been copied.
When Henley mentioned the victims' names to Olivier, there
was recognition in his eyes and she spotted yet another tie:
the new victims distantly knew the imprisoned Olivier.
From his prison cell, Olivier fumed. Someone copied his
crimes and was stealing the limelight, there were leaks to
the press and they were all wrong, and DI Henley was
ridiculously off-course in her thinking. There was only
one Jigsaw Man – everybody else was a copycat – and
Olivier was going to escape from prison and prove it...
Reading The Jigsaw Man is a lesson in contradictions.
It's good. It's everything you want in a thriller: an evil
maniac, another evil maniac, an on-the-edge
detective, a love triangle or two, and blood. Plenty of
blood, spilled in the most gruesome way possible. For fans
of thrillers, the things that author Nadine Matheson offers
are like sprinkles on ice cream: absolutely necessary and
the more, the better.
And yet, there's two big, nearly-insurmountable problems.
"The Jigsaw Man" is set in Great Britain and, as such, is
formatted differently in many ways that can cause confusion,
particularly in acronyms and, most especially, in dialogue;
reading a conversation takes an exhausting amount of
attention, lest you mis-attribute a sentence or an important
character thought. It's a hot mess, exacerbated by an
overabundance of characters that are thrown at readers,
unsorted, and all within the first few dozen pages.
Overall, you'll be thrilled by this thriller, but also
perhaps annoyed, so keep that in mind. If you can handle the
latter, you'll love The Jigsaw Man. If not, then keep
away.
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