Absolutely fantastic! This book has many of my favorite elements in a murder mystery; the burnt out, flawed, but forever dedicated cop; the really sick and twisted murders, an unknown enemy trying to sabotage everything....... And most of all: a kick ass ending! Highly recommend but not if you're squeamish. :)

Can't say that I loved this one! Something about it just didn't grab me!

Overall, “The Killing Lessons” isn’t a bad book — it just has a hard time separating itself from the hundreds of other serial killer investigations out on the market. The overall plot is compelling, but it ultimately has little payoff with the final act being the most disappointing. There’s little explanation of motive for the killer and the subplot between the main character, Valerie Hart and an FBI agent is just dumb. Give me more of this compelling plot and less of the personal bull shit of the detective’s subplots. It manages to fall into many of the same old tropes, including a hardened detective damaged by a past case. It seems as though the author went into this with the intent of creating a spanning series, but it’s disappointing for this first book. Maybe in a later sequel it will pay off.
On another note, this guy needs an editor. Thoughts and concepts that could easily be conveyed in a sentence or two span entire paragraphs. “The Killing Lessons” could have had the same effect at just a fraction of the page length

Holy dark and gritty novel!! I don't know what I thought I was going to get when I started [b:The Killing Lessons|23848102|The Killing Lessons (Valerie Hart, #1)|Saul Black|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1429101816l/23848102._SY75_.jpg|40617224] by [a:Saul Black|8004236|Saul Black|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1439998941p2/8004236.jpg], but I definitely wasn't expecting it to be so intense. There is so much descriptive violence and gore, and there is NO way you should read it unless you are okay with both of those things. There are a lot of viewpoint changes and a lot of characters as well, but somehow, I mostly kept them all straight and didn't find myself confused. Even though this series features Valerie Hart as our main character, I didn't feel like her viewpoint got way more attention than anyone else. Some character's POVs don't show up as often and Hart is still definitely the main POV, but I thought Black did a great job of giving the other characters attention, so this wasn't just a straight-up police procedural. Thanks to all of the viewpoints, as the reader we are omniscient and know everything that is happening so the killer isn't really a surprise to anyone but Hart our homicide detective. I don't always love when authors choose to do this, but I thought it worked really well for this book.

I thought the audiobook for The Killing Lessons was very interesting, and it is narrated by Christina Delaine. I chose the word interesting because I can't really think of a better word to describe it. The way Delaine narrates is almost at a certain tempo, and I am very curious to know if the author or publisher directed her to do this or if that was her interpretation of the writing style. Either way, I was a big fan of it, and it gave the book a different kind of feel than I would have gotten from reading it - in a good way! My first impression of Hart was that she has a lot of guilt from not being able to solve a previous crime and it was doing a lot to her psyche. She grapples with a couple of things throughout the novel and I will be very interested to see where the rest of the series takes us with her character. This is a pretty long book and the audio was a whopping 14 hours and 39 minutes. I think The Killing Lessons dragged a bit at times and other times it was nonstop action, so maybe it could have been whittled down a bit. But for a debut, this was really impressive, and I am IN for every book to come!

My review and GIVEAWAY here!!

http://angelerin.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-killing-lessons-by-saul-black.html

I don't usually read much crime fiction, but if Glen Duncan writes a crime novel, I'm in. His writing is delightful on every level. It's clever and philosophical without being didactic or allowing its intellect to obscure the edge-of-your-seat thrills. His characters are wonderfully, tenderly, realistically drawn, which make the moments of human brutality in this book even more terrifying. His pacing is spectacular - I haven't been so gripped by a book for a very long time. Go read this book right now, and don't come up for air until you've finished - you won't want to.

Word to the wise - maybe don’t finish this book at 12:51am. Oh and don’t start it at then either. Now that I think about it, maybe only read this book between the hours of 11am and 1pm.

Read this one for book club. It's hard to get over how disturbing it is to be put in the mind of both an insane serial killer and also his rape/murder victims. It was fascinating at times, but I can't say, in the end, that I truly enjoyed it. I had to speed read through a few parts because it just got a little too gory for my taste.

I really liked the character of Valerie Hart, and felt a lot of sympathy for her. That has to be a really difficult job, when you feel as though you are responsible for not catching a murder when people are dying, seemingly in front of your face. I was rooting for her even when she was doing clearly stupid things, like drinking whole bottles of vodka and tracking down FBI agents to beat them up. She is smart, tenacious, and willing to do anything for the case. Not always a good thing, but mostly so.

If there's anyone I wish we got to learn more about, it was Carla, and whatever her relationship had been with Carter. Maybe it would have been easier to understand her obsession if we'd been able to see what exact effect Valerie had had on him.

Couldn't get into this one. Had to force myself to finish it. Very slow book although the story was good.