Review: Let the Devil Sleep by John Verdon
Retired NYPD detective Dave Gurney reluctantly agrees to mentor his friend’s daughter, a journalism grad student doing a documentary on the families of Good Shepherd victims, a serial killer who shot drivers of luxury cars on the interstate ten years ago and then vanished. Then someone starts threatening her, and Gurney starts wondering if the original case wasn’t quite what the FBI said it was.
John Verdon writes the slowest of slow burns, and Let the Devil Sleep is no exception. If you came in cold from book one, you might find the early chapters borderline glacial. I love this about Verdon. He treats the reader like an adult who can sit with ambiguity, who can read a long conversation about criminal profiling and find it interesting on its own terms. There’s a chess-game quality to how he assembles a case, with Gurney quietly noticing things no one else has noticed for a decade.
Listened to the audiobook narrated by George Newbern, who I think is actually the perfect voice for Gurney. He plays the dryness without making it deadpan, which is a tightrope.
Now the complaints. Madeleine, Gurney’s wife, continues to be written like the universe’s most patient saint, and their marriage subplot has been the weakest part of all three books. Verdon clearly wants her to be the moral compass, but she keeps reading as a plot device. Also, the resolution leans into a particular thriller-novel flourish that I won’t spoil but will say: Verdon has now done a version of this twice and it’s losing impact.
For who? Patient readers who like Tana French’s pacing and Thomas Harris’s interest in profiler psychology. Skip if you want a propulsive page-turner; this is not that.
Best of the series? No. Still better than most of what’s on the thriller shelf? Yes.