4 out of 4 stars
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The Embalmer by Vincent Zandri is an action thriller story of a detective however it gives an experience of watching a horror movie. The main character in this book is Steve Jobz, the name that sounds similar to Steve Jobs who was the founder and CEO of Apple Inc. Steve feels a bit uncomfortable with his last name Jobz because he thinks people may make fun of him in some way. Steve was a former cop, but he was fired from that job for his misjudgment during an encounter and shooting a teenager. Later he joins the Unemployment Insurance Fraud Investigations Agency and waits for a breakthrough.
All of a sudden the news spreads everywhere about a serial killer who kills the victim by injecting the embalming fluid into the victim's body when the victim is still alive. Then after that, he shifts the victim’s body to some public place but ensures that nobody sees him while doing it. When such incidents start repeating, the other protagonist, detective Miller, takes the official help from Steve to trace out the culprit using the data available with Steve. Inputs from Steve help Miller to narrow down the search to fewer suspects. It appears at the beginning of the story that all these crimes could be an act of a psychopath.
At the beginning of the book, there was a feeling that this may be a detective story only, but after the midway, it appeared as a horror packed action story as well. The flow of the book was good enough so that it did not hinder the thrilling experience while reading it. The description of the victim's bodies is very much nerve-wracking and also quite disgusting. Even though the book was quite captivating, the detail descriptions of the embalming procedure disgusted me a bit. I don't recommend this book for weak hearted and also to those who dislike the flesh cutting scenes and sight of blood. I feel this book is suitable for the mature adults only.
I like the author's art of crafting the characters especially of Steve who was humorous enough to make me laugh at sometimes. Steve is not like a superhero or a macho man, but he is just a simple person, which can make the reader easily get absorbed into his character. The only thing I disliked is that he drinks too much alcohol and gets out of his control at times, which I feel is not appropriate for projecting a cop on duty.
I could rarely find any grammatical or the spelling errors, and so that did not affect the reading experience. I appreciate the vast vocabulary of the author, but there were certain new words used in this book for which I needed to use a dictionary. I was able to complete reading within one day as the pages swiftly turned one after another. Initially, I considered giving three stars for my dislikes as mentioned above. Then taking into consideration both my likes and dislikes, weighing its importance, I rate this book with 4 out of 4 stars for the quality content.
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The Embalmer
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It sounds like a good combination of a detective story and horror packed action. It's great that the book was captivating - but I think I'll be a bit squeamish reading about the flesh cutting scenes. I'll have to skim that part!
