Review: The Jigsaw Man

Auteur: Nadine Matheson

Roman: The Jigsaw Man

Print length : 464

Publisher : HQ

Date de sortie: 06/01/2022

Synopsis:

When bodies start washing up along the banks of the River Thames, DI Henley fears it is the work of Peter Oliver, the notorious Jigsaw Killer. But it can’t be him; Oliver is already behind bars, and Henley was the one who put him there.

Review:

The Jigsaw Killer drags the reader into a grim, clinging darkness from which one emerges breathless, almost tainted by the suffocating atmosphere Nadine Matheson crafts with surgical precision. From the opening pages, the shadow of The Silence of the Lambs looms like a threat—not as a simple reference, but as a chilling echo of an inevitable confrontation between the fragile humanity of the investigator and the methodical monstrosity of the Butcher. The same moral vertigo is there, the sense that evil advances masked, watching long before it strikes.

Matheson also revives the bleak codes of 1980s and 1990s crime fiction—stories that never shied away from showing the world at its ugliest: police stations saturated with disillusion, streets where rain washes away blood without ever cleansing anyone’s conscience, and detectives stumbling forward under the weight of their own ghosts. The novel exudes a thick, oppressive atmosphere where truth slips further away, and every discovery feels like a step deeper into an abyss one would rather avoid.

The Jigsaw Killer himself—terrifying in his cold rationality—recalls those cinematic killers who shun the light and thrive instead in the dead zones of the human psyche. Matheson makes his presence haunting even when he’s absent from the page; a chilling breath lingering over every scene.

At the centre of it all, the investigator pushes on—broken, yet relentless—aware that she must descend into darkness if she hopes to climb back out alive. The psychological tension, at times nearly unbearable, gives the novel its hypnotic power.

The Jigsaw Killer spares nothing and no one: a brutal, visceral thriller steeped in a darkness that reminds us the most dangerous monsters aren’t the ones we imagine… but the ones we refuse to see.