The second offering in Mark Pryor’s Hugo Marston series, about a US embassy security head in Paris, is The Crypt Thief. I liked it, but not as much as the first book.

On summer night in the famous Pére Lachaise cemetery, near the grave of Jim Morrison, a young couple is shot to death. One of them is an American man from a prominent family; the woman is a dancer who turns out to have connections to a suspected terrorist. It is also discovered that a grave has been robbed – part of the skeleton of a famous Paris dancer has been taken. Where others see a terrorist act, Hugo Marston, whose background is in criminal profiling, sees the grave desecration as the central point. He suspects – and fears – that this may be the beginning of a string of serial killings. Since he’s the hero, we know he’s going to be right.

Once again Hugo is joined by his CIA friend Tom (who is showing troubling signs of a serious drinking problem) and his girlfriend Claudia, a plucky reporter with (as is common in fictional females) no rational sense of danger whatever.

This story didn’t work for me as well as The Bookseller. I thought it fell into a lot of common thriller tropes. The serial killer was certainly an original type, but extreme; I had trouble believing in him. And I’m a little weary of stories where the hero is sure he has to rush into danger personally, because the police don’t understand the truth the way he does.

But it wasn’t bad. I’ll still continue reading the series. Cautions for very disturbing subject matter.