Senseless - Ronald Malfi

In some respects Ronald Malfi's Senseless is a standard thriller with familiar elements in place. The novel opens with a serial killer situation developing, the body of a young woman discovered in the desert outside Los Angeles a year after the similar horrific killing and mutilation (not necessarily in that order) of an actress in horror B-movies. The cop investigating the murder has been going through a difficult time after his wife's death from cancer, and this is a setback because he believed that he had found the killer after the first murder

There is a little twist here - not really a spoiler, but certainly something that is essential to note since it adds another element of uncertainty and ambiguity to the case - in that it's suggested that Detective Bill Rennie had 'resolved' the previous case by helping the husband of the dead woman bury the body of the man they believed was her killer. The question that troubles him - aside from getting found out - is whether this is a copycat killer or did they get something very wrong.

There are a few other elements - initially hard to connect to the new murder - that continue to make the case that Senseless is indeed not like any ordinary thriller. In a parallel plot-line Maureen is introduced to the wayward son of Greg, a Hollywood producer who she is going to marry. Landon is a bit wild, but his friend/hanger-on tells Maureen about some of Landon's troubling behaviours with women, and that he has a book of crime scene photographs of the second woman who has been murdered. What is different about this part of the novel is that Maureen is a writer and there are excerpts included from 'Hollywood Vampires', the latest novel she is working on, a strange and disturbing horror novel.

So there are a few connecting elements there relating to the horror movie industry, to Hollywood lives, but there is a further strange third part to Senseless. Meet Toby Krampen, who we are told is a human fly. Having escaped from the Spider’s web he finds his calling when he is introduced to the role of Renfield from Dracula by a beautiful goth lady with vampire teeth he has met in a club called The Coffin. Where this fits in is anyone's guess at the early stage of the novel, but although the first two parts have familiar thriller features, there is enough here to keep you intrigued as to the direction each of these threads are going.

It's not weirdness for the sake of it - or not just for the sake of it. Malfi uses each of these elements to find a less conventional path to a murder mystery investigation. And you can be certain - not least because of the flaws in the character of the lead detective - that it's not one that the police with limited resources and little experience of this kind of murder investigation are going to solve through persistence and cleverness. It's going to take all the other strange events, not least the nature of the killings themselves, to make their way up to the surface for it all to come together. And you can be sure when it does, it's going to be exceptional.

Reading notes: Senseless by Ronald Malfi is published by Titan Books on the 15th April 2025. My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance eBook preview copy.