Like Ben Elton’s Dead Famous (2001), this offbeat mystery features a Big Brother–like reality TV show, a murder, and a cantankerous detective, Alban Bane, who must overcome his revulsion for everything and everyone connected with the show if he is to find out whodunit. There’s also a touch of the hit TV series House here, too: like the small-screen physician, the cranky, pain-pill-popping Bane adds a delightfully sarcastic tone to the action. But, for all of that, the novel somehow manages to avoid feeling derivative. Armstrong’s abundant enthusiasm for his material, combined with the semi-satirical plotline, compel us to keep reading, and his prose style keeps us chuckling. The sleuth who disdains the world in which he finds himself is an idea as old as Raymond Chandler, but Armstrong injects the trope with new vigor. This is a series to watch from a new publisher to watch. —David Pitt, Booklist
]]>Premise and Originality: 10 out of 10
Characterization: 8 out of 10
Dialogue: 9 out of 10
Storyline: 9 out of 10
Fathering two teenage daughters, you’d think detective Alban Bane would have enough to fret about, but in The Game, a hugely cinematic thriller with hilarious dark comic moments, we find him quickly dealing with headless corpses. Not that headless corpses give you much trouble because they’re usually real still and don’t talk back and you don’t have to worry about making meaningful eye contact with them, it’s just that this scrappy, witty cop is pretty motivated to find out how they lost so much weight real quick … especially after he gets a creepy letter inviting him to come find out. This is an irresistible story that centers around a new American reality television show called Haunted Survivor, where a boiling-pot mix of soon-to-be-dead-but-they-don’t know-it-yet contestants see how long they can survive in an old Vermont mansion haunted by its former occupant, a mass murder, who left the planet in the first chapter by execution by lethal injection. Survive and get one million dollars, but these contestants are having a hard time surviving. They’re having an easy time, however, getting slaughtered. You’ve got to love a novel that crystallizes, in a single line, our squirmy fascination with this sort of thing, delivered by Haunted Survivor’s uptight producer who finally becomes good and unstrung at the end of the story herself, “We’re assuming,” she said, “America’s fascination with reality television and crime will continue.” Sure does, lady. Sure does. And you’ve got to love a thriller, like all great literate thrillers, that makes you feel pretty sure you know who the killer is … but guess what. Depending on how you lean, Bane pulls for the Boston Red Sox, so this gives him a dangerous or desperate quality, or both. The poor cop’s pretty beat up by the end of the story, but he knows how to take a bullet and a good stabbing and bleed all over the place as he attempts to save one of those pesky teenage daughters of his who got caught up in the slaughter. Bane doesn’t know it, but one of the best fight scenes you’ll ever read … and there are a bunch of them in The Game … is being videotaped by the show’s sinister creator, and later shown as a news clip as a testament to Bane’s professional viciousness. Good job, Dad, saving your daughter’s head like that. Videotape is fine for now, but from the first few lines of The Game, you can see this book on the big screen, too. Of course, by then you’ll know who the killer is … but who cares. We’re fascinated with reality television and crime and we just can’t help it ... because it’s so much bloody fun.
Films & Books Magazine
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(out of 5)
Aspirin-popping, tartan-accented Alban Bane pushes his way through the crowd outside San Quentin with an open umbrella. He carries a badge, he says, he’s allowed to be a jerk. Bane’s come to witness the execution by lethal injection of an old nemesis, Tyler Hayden, who tortured and killed 13 youngsters on a spree from Florida to California. Bane had been with the FBI back then. He’d had a wife back then. As Bane watches Hayden die on the gurney, IVs strapped to each arm, the killer speaks to him: Friend Bane, he says. I know who killed your wife.
As much as Bane would like to get to the bottom of that sodium thiopental revelation, fresh kills keep getting in the way. Less than 24 hours after the execution, Bane is in a chopper in the middle of a snowstorm on the other side of the country. As chief detective for Vermont’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, he’s been called to the scene of the state’s biggest money-maker, Mason Place mansion, home of the reality TV show Haunted Survivor. There, in a sub-basement, dangling upside-down from a beam, is an “unrecognizable lump that might have been Colin Lorentz, television producer.” In a murder reminiscent of Tyler Hayden’s style, the body is shorn of head, genitals, fingertips, identity. Most ominous of all however, are the injection marks, one on either arm—not like Tyler Hayden’s style, rather just like the dead Tyler Hayden.
Over a period of 21 days, from Golden Gate Bridge Park to the bat-filled caves of Vermont’s Green Mountains, Detective Alban Bane is whirled from victim to victim. Within the labyrinthine Mason Place, through attics, dungeons and mansion halls, the glass eyes and ears of reality TV spy silently from behind walls. Reporters crowd the mansion gates and cameramen crowd the detective’s back as the murders become a “game,” a personal war of revenge between Bane and the daddy of all killers.
Derek Armstrong writes with tremendous force and self-confidence. The co-author of a book of nonfiction, The Persona Principle (Simon & Schuster), he has another book of fiction, a historical thriller, in the works at Künati.The Game promises to be the first in a series of Alban Bane thrillers. Gruesome, suspenseful, and rich with dark humor, Armstrong moves the reader through time and space with a keen sense of momentum and dash. His characters are diverse, bold, unforgettable, from the detective’s adolescent daughters to the Renfield-like doctor on the set of Haunted Survivor. Armstrong’s swashbuckling Scotsman is a welcome addition in the thriller tradition of Weisman and Connolly.
Reviewed by Heather Shaw
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The Game
Author: Derek Armstrong
Review Date: OCTOBER 15, 2006
Publisher:Kunati
Pages: 352
Price (hardback): $24.95
Publication Date: Spring 2007
ISBN (hardback): 1-60164-001-3
Category: FICTION
Classification: MYSTERY
Alban Bane, a crusty Vermont cop with a super-sleuth rep, handles the letter gingerly. It's been personally delivered, a courtesy that spells obvious danger. And it's suitably terse, reading only, "Welcome to the Game." Before the game begins, however, hold for a subplot. In a remote, castle-like mansion, once the home of an infamous Vermont mass murderer, Real TV is producing a reality show titled Haunted Survivor. The idea is to imprison a dozen people, scare them silly (snakes and things), film each meltdown with hidden cameras and pay $1,000,000 to the last contestant standing. "Survivor meets Fear Factor" is how it's being marketed. Bane is on the set because someone's been decapitated. Other decapitations follow in due course. Are they the work of the grisly gamester? True enough, there's a subsequent letter in which Bane is taken to task for not being an adroit enough player. But how about these militia guys in the Green Mountain Freedom movement? Bane wouldn't put it past them to murder for the sake of publicity. Suddenly there's a multiplicity of games in town.
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