Judson, Daniel: Voyeur

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Daniel Judson's 2010 novel Voyeur starts strong. Remer is a seriously proficient Manhattan private investigator who's taught a vicious lesson by someone who's unhappy with his professional voyeurism. Five years later, Remer's living an altogether different life. He owns a liquor store in Southhampton. He keeps to himself. He medicates himself with a homemade drug cocktail and has no-strings-attached sex with the woman who lives upstairs. But then Remer is asked to find a missing person, someone from his past in Southhampton, and his carefully crafted new life is ripped apart.

Voyeur contains some genuinely tense moments and good writing, but the story gets bogged down in a plot that's far too complicated to bother following. A less lazy reader than I would perhaps enjoy this one more, but I'm afraid that once I feel I have to start taking notes to follow a story, I lose interest. The book also left me with questions: Why was there so much emphasis on Remer's upstairs neighbor when she was largely irrelevant to the plot? Ditto on his drug concoction. And why do the dramatic events in the novel (and in Judson's earlier The Violet Hour, for that matter) take place around holidays, given that the holidays aren't important to the story? Does this add something I'm missing?

In short the book, which begins so promisingly, left me disappointed--all the more so because reading The Violet Hour (see my review) left me eager for more from this author.

Comments

[Kaye]

1.

The cover is kind of mysterious which describes what the story is about.