Book & Baking Blog Entry 26

Crush: The Final Moments

I have to say that I wrote my last blog believing that Jacobson's Crush  really had no further hilarity to be shared.  I wrote the blog without the true badness that the ending brought to me.  How bad?  Bad bad.

I don't think that there can be a spoiler.  We have some real fun as the book winds down.  A character introduced about 1/2 to 2/3 through the book ends up being our killer.  Of course he was hitting on (successfully) our local hottie cop.  What's amazing is that the FBI agent had the entire department chasing a number of others, jumping from one theory to the next with wild abandon.  Two of these suspects were police themselves.  She totally ignores the one cop who is acting suspiciously which is telegraphed in a heavy handed way.  Can I say again that I hope that the FBI are not quite so arrogant or ineffective as Agent Vail.  And how embarrassing for the FBI mentioned in the acknowledgements.  Really, did you LIKE the character?  Seriously?

So, Vail gets a number of people killed, only finds the killer because he tries to kill the cop that he's hitting on when she gets the call with his name given to her by a microsoft tech!  (Thumbs up to Microsoft--the true hero of this tale.)   Vail follows up her fiasco of a manhunt with an embarrassingly amateurish interview.  Was it supposed to seem like she even knew what she was doing?  AND since when do you really just send one very tired cop in to question such an important suspect.  It's also funny that Napa Valley still has no idea that there was a serial killer in their midst.

So, to end this the suspect just tells our "heroine" that she just doesn't get and probably never will and he knows that this will make her crazy (which she acknowledges to herself is the truth--why not just walk away from this nut-job?), her boyfriend has disappeared, and our actual suspicious cop has been somehow secretly working with the killer because his wife and son were threatened.  THE END. 

So, no ACTUAL payoff at all.  Except hours wasted.  I wish I read faster.