Fairly often, when I don’t like a book, I just drop it. But sometimes I feel it necessary to write a bad review as a warning to the unwary. That is the case with Simon King’s The Final Alibi.

Jim Lawson is a psychiatrist in Australia in the early 1950s. But once he was a cop, and he participated in the arrest of “the Devil,” a monster who kidnapped young women and ate them alive (there is no lack of graphic description). The experience shook him so much that he left the police and went into psychiatry. He also wrote a couple bestselling true crime books about the case.

Now he gets a request to come back to the town of Cider Hill, where it all happened. Somebody has taken up where “the Devil” left off – the murders occurring now are identical. And the convicted killer is still locked up in prison. Could they have been wrong about him all this time? Is there some way he could be getting out to kill again?

Jim joins forces with an attractive young female police officer to try to figure things out – which will lead them to more encounters with mangled bodies. Also, Jim takes up again with the girl he rescued from the Devil back in the day, with whom he had an affair before he left town. But it turns out she has secrets, and she’s not the only one covering things up.

There’s a point where the thriller genre crosses over into plain horror, and (as I’ve often stated) I don’t like horror. This book portrayed far too much plain suffering and awfulness, far too explicitly, for my taste. (I think the intention is to tap the Silence of the Lambs vein). Also, the writing was sometimes weak, the author making bad word choices. And the central psychological diagnosis is one which, I believe, is no longer considered valid.

On top of all that, we’re left with a cliff-hanger, which always annoys me.

If you have a stronger stomach than I do, you may enjoy The Final Alibi. It was certainly a fast-paced, high-tension story. But they couldn’t pay me to tackle the next two books in this trilogy.