“A By-the-Book Police Procedural”: A Review of Righteous Assassin, by Kevin G. Chapman
(A Mike Stoneman Thriller, KDP, 2018). ISBN: 9781723898730 One of the challenges and joys of genre writing is employing a plethora of tried-and-true tropes while bringing in something original and ultimately unexpected. This is hard enough to do with larger genres like the crime thriller, never mind drilling down into smaller loops of the spiral, into the police procedural and, in the case of Righteous Assassin , into the serial killer police procedural. Within a few pages of Righteous Assassin , I felt deeply at home—not only because I teach about and have written numerous thrillers for the stage, page, screen, and Escape Rooms—but because Chapman was employing all of the genre’s prevalent tropes. His lead character, Mike Stoneman, is a hard-nosed Manhattan police detective who is single, impatient, and given to holding everyone around him to the high standards to which he holds himself. Consider his last name, Stone man, which is like Willy Lo man in Arthur Miller’s Death o...