"Irresistible" by Ethan Black

The beginning of “Irresistible” grabbed me well and I couldn’t put the book down. The book begins from the killer’s point of view. A woman is naked, drunk and talking into a tape recorder. She’s furious and rambling and you can’t figure out what’s going on. She then dresses up, goes out on a New York City night, and flirts with a man, but not just any man, a very specific one. Of course she is incredibly beautiful, but she also seems to know a lot about the man. They have a few drinks with her, he invites her back to her house, they have sex and… kills and mutilates him. She showers and cleans the apartment and then writes on the bathroom wall in the man’s blood: “I know you.”

The point of view shifts to the police detective in the sex crimes division who will be working on the case. His name is Conrad Voort and he comes from a long line of cops and he’s also incredibly rich. He’s a series character and I’ve read a previous book with him in it. It never made sense to me why Voort (always known by his last name) would continue to put himself in danger as a cop, when he doesn’t have to. He could retire or do something else.

Voort is an interesting character, but at this point the book slows down because there is a lot of intrusiveness from the author. I don’t really care about his ancestors, when they came to the new world, how they made money there, etc. All that superfluous information got sidetracked from the plot and I started skimming. The author also has a strange penchant for describing what everyone is wearing! I didn’t really care and it added nothing to the story.

The serial killer has a list of four men’s names and intends to kill them all. Voort is the last name on the list. We see her picking up number two and then killing number three. The pace of the book slows down towards the middle and doesn’t really pick up until the end. We find out what motivates the killer and how he got all that information, and it’s interesting. While I enjoyed the book, I think it would have been better if Voort had been a bit more humanized. Much of history was entangled with him, his girlfriends, past and present, and all of Dutch history.

I’m not sure I’ve read another Voort book, but “Irresistible” kept me interested until the end.