Spoiler alert number one! Timothy Blake is a cannibal. This is the third book in the series after Hangman and Hunter so if you didn’t know about Blake’s icky predilection already, you haven’t read the first two and this isn’t the book to start with. It’s best to read them in order because you get to experience the shock of discovering his penchant for eating human flesh and then decide if you can stomach reading about it for an entire series.

Spoiler alert number two! Timothy Blake doesn’t eat a single person in Hideout. And considering he’s hiding out in a remote farmhouse with a group of people who run a torture porn and snuff film website – so he’s got lots of worthy scumbags to choose from – it ends up being kind of a disappointment.

In the second book, Blake’s romantic interest and FBI agent Reese Thistle discovered his cannibalism and disappeared. Now, figuring his life is over and not wanting to go to jail, he has decided to kill himself. But not before he takes out Fred, who runs a website that posts footage of torture and murders for paying subscribers.

However, when Blake turns up to Fred’s house in the middle of nowhere impersonating Lux, who has previously sent Fred torture videos to earn his trust and who Blake has already killed, the house is full of other people just like Fred. They call themselves the Guards. Torturers, murderers and sadists who help him run the website and create content by beating and tormenting the handful of captives locked up in the shed out the back.

Well, he might be a cannibal but Blake doesn’t want all of these people on his conscience. So he decides to take the Guards out one by one in order to save the prisoners. But before he can enact his plan, one of the Guards is discovered dead in his bedroom. It looks like suicide but Blake is immediately suspicious. Fred asks him to investigate, reasoning that Blake couldn’t have been the killer because he was with Fred at the time. Everyone else, therefore, is a suspect.

The problem with this plot is that all the suspects are bad guys, the victim is a bad guy, the main character is a bad guy and it’s hard to care about any of them. And they’re not really interesting bad guys like Blake was in the first book. They’re just a bit blah. Even Blake is just a shell of his former self. And then there’s a weird subplot involving one of the Guards who may or may not be Blake’s biological son from a decades old sperm donation.

There’s a real sense of claustrophobia about Hideout as it’s set in a middle of nowhere location and the characters hardly leave it until the last part of the book. When an author writes a story like this, with limited characters and settings, it’s incumbent on them to make sure the characters are fascinating and the settings are intriguing. Instead, the characters seem like losers and posers and the setting is a mostly ordinary house with a lot of padlocks and the meant-to-be-creepy instructions not to go upstairs. It’s not Mrs Rochester in the attic but it comes damn close.

In the end, this just seems like a not particularly sophisticated effort to reset Timothy Blake’s world just as it was about to spiral completely out of control. So instead of working for the FBI or a local crime lord like in the last two books, he’ll instead be working for another agency in future books. But if he keeps losing body parts at the rate he currently is, there’s barely going to be enough of him left for the action required.

In a word: bland.

2.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 4 May 2021