"He understood now that he hadn't escaped the swamp. He never would."
In For the Kill was "meh" in every sense. The best parts for me were the flashbacks to the killer's childhood. I usually don't care for leaps back in forth in time, but I think it was done well here, and I enjoyed these expeditions into the past. The killer's method of displaying the bodies was interesting, I think there was potential for a really creepy and fascinating killer here. There is also a twist in the last third or so of the book that I didn't see coming. It wasn't wholly original, but it was unexpected. This reveal was where the pace finally picked up for me.
This book could have been condensed significantly. The repetitiveness made the story drag on longer than necessary (describing each crime scene as exactly like the last, for pages, at every crime scene, forever) before finally picking up the pace towards the grand finale. After slowly trudging through up to this point, I raced to the end for answers. I didn't get them, at least not the ones I wanted. The big ending didn't really make sense. Instead of offering any explanation for the bait and switch of the ending, the author instead summed up return to a boring life for the remaining characters. I didn't have strong ties to any of the characters, so I wasn't very interested in any of these tidy endings. There was a way bigger issue to get to the bottom of than if the retired cops daughter got back with her boyfriend, the human worm.
Other than some interesting things about the killer, the rest of the characters were not very interesting cliches, from hardened, grisly cop to his media-conscious boss, there just wasn't much to appreciate about any of the characters, particularly the female characters. From this book you would understand women to do little aside from gazing at themselves in reflective surfaces and online shopping. Even the "tough" female cop is basically a pretty puppet, running around and being angry, but hot (in that 'she's so cute when she's mad' way of course).
Meh.