No One Will Hear You is a violent serial killer mystery novel. This is not a novel for the squeamish, and in fairly brutal in is descriptions of the violence involved.
I am a fan of Max Allen Collin’s writing, and am used to his hard-boiled detective novels and other works. This is a second co-written novel dealing with the crew of a Reality TV crime show. The novel takes some time at the beginning to set the stage after the first novel, “You Can’t Stop Me,” but a new reader can pick it up without reading that book. A minor flaw with the novel was the only the major characters working on the fiction TV show are developed beyond a quick sketch, so a few chapters in, it’s clear which characters are important and which are just window dressing.
The novel’s antagonists are a pair of serial killers, one of whom is planning his murders in order to become a “star” on the fiction TV series. The novel is well plotted, builds the suspense effectively and hits all of the story beats expertly, which is what I expect from a writer as experienced as Collins. There are a few clichés that turn up, the gore and shock factor is strong, and in the end, the soldi writing carries it through to the finale.
The setting for this and the previous novel are interesting, and the plot has the requisite twists and turns, but I felt that the characters were just a writer’s chess pieces, and nowhere did I feel interested in them beyond the suspense aspect of the plot. In the end, it’s a well-crafted page turned that left me a bit cold due to the lack of characterization the shocking nature of the murders in the story.