Book Review: The Nothing Man

Irish author Catherine Ryan Howard takes the book-within-a-book trope and gives it a fiendishly clever spin in her latest psyhological thriller The Nothing Man. "There are three sides to every story, they say: yours, mine and the truth," writes Eve Black in her true crime memoir (which also bears the same title), who at 12 was the lone survivor of a horrific attack in her own home that would leave her parents and younger sister dead. Her quest for truth sets off alarm bells in Jim Doyle, who, as it turns out, is The Nothing Man himself (the name the media gave him) and is working as a security guard at a supermarket after ending his serial killing run two decades ago, little realising that the book was all but a bait to force him to come out of hiding and dismantle his carefully constructed facade of a life. As Black herself puts it succintly, "The Nothing Man was to be a true-crime book that, if all went well, would lead the Nothing Man to commit one more crime." Written in an unusual style that alternates between documentary-like prose and the killer's obsession over his own past crimes, Ryan Howard plays her cards cleverly by withholding crucial information that works in surprising ways despite revealing the identity of the killer right off the bat. A truly original and ingenious crime thriller!