There is a long, long, long sequence where Vince describes recording the voices of the dead on cassette tapes, and it does not play into the rest of the story. Of all the other suspects in the case, he gets the most attention even though he is not the most interesting in the lineup. We randomly jump from Kinderman’s perspective to that of Vince Amfortas, a doctor at the Georgetown hospital where Kinderman does most of his investigating. William Peter Blatty is all about the details, but his writing is almost at a Dickensian level of unnecessary here. You wonder why Atkins didn’t go Monty Python and the Holy Grail on him and yell “GET ON WITH IT!” But when Kinderman talks for paragraphs and paragraphs about the same thing, seemingly in an unawares trance, you lose track of what the point of the scene even is. They were some of my favorite parts of that book. But those tangents were interesting and gave perspective to Regan’s odd and violent behavior. That’s not to say that The Exorcist did not have a few side tangents here and there. But he just keeps going and going and going. A little bit of talking, just to show Kinderman’s knowledge about the concept, would be fine. Once, when he and his assistant Atkins are observing a crime scene, Kinderman just starts sermonizing about birds and bugs and evolution and it just does not add much. But several times throughout, Kinderman goes on these ramblings about the most irrelevant things. Kinderman is described as eccentric, and his colleagues do not always follow his train of thought. However, it is just not as tightly written as its predecessor. Kinderman is a compelling main character, the murders are gruesome and effective, and the suspense is engaging. Blatty to reproduce the same horrific magic with this book. But the truth behind these murders is far darker, and much closer to home, than Kinderman could have imagined. After a second priest is killed, Kinderman retraces these murders back to a notorious Georgetown criminal called the Gemini Killer, long thought dead.
He finds himself pondering the nature of God and evil as, soon, a priest is found murdered in the nearby church. This time, he is faced with the murder of a twelve-year-old boy, found crucified to a makeshift cross. Set twelve years after The Exorcist, detective lieutenant Bill Kinderman is still solving cases in Georgetown, Washington D.C.
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