Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels isn’t having a good day. Unsure whether she really loves her new boyfriend, still attracted to her ex-husband worried about her aging mother (and the old woman’s sex life), the last thing she needs is to be called to an autopsy where the body has some assembly .required And worse than that, she really doesn’t need to know that the arms the pathologist is about to examine are held together by a pair of Jack’s own handcuffs…

Bloody Mary is the second novel by J.A. Konrath, whose previous novel Whiskey Sour brought him a great deal of praise for its mixture of violence and humour. In Bloody Mary, Konrath keeps those corpses piling up while fleshing out his cast of regular characters and telling a wonderful, rollicking story that is as funny as it is violent.

Konrath’s work has been compared to that of Janet Evanovich, and it’s easy to see why this comparison has been made. Both the Jack Daniels novels and the Stephanie Plum series feature heroines who work in harsh environments populated by somewhat seedy characters. Both series have a healthy sense of humour and the protagonists have a tangled, unfortunate love life. But with Stephanie Plum, the illusion is never quite complete; you never believe that here is a tough bounty hunter. In the real world, Steph would be stomped underfoot by the bad guys (and even in the books, without Ranger around to save her butt she’d probably be stomped underfoot). Jack, on the other hand, is believable as a homicide cop. Her world view is tinged with just the right amount of cynicism and her unwavering professionalism and dedication to her work are never in question. Jack doesn’t need the men in her life to save her ass, even if she needs them for a bit company and love. Jack can kick ass with the best of them and – as Bloody Mary shows – she often does.

It’s the balance and contrast of Jack’s personal and professional worlds where Konrath shows his skills. We care as much about the personal woes of Jack’s life as we do about her catching the killer. Her relationship with her mother in particular is affecting, and captures just the right amount of infuriation and affection that comes with such relationships. While Konrath is a very funny (and often disturbing) writer, he never forgets to round out his characters, making them solid for the reader, creating a connection that gives us a personal stake in the action. Even the standard fat cop (Jack’s Viagra pushing, donut loving partner, Herb) is more than a simple cliché. He’s a good cop, with his own trials and tribulations to face. We feel that – even if he doesn’t get as much exposure as Jack – this guy has a life beyond what we see on the pages. We’re not there to see it all happen, but we know that he lives outside the confines of plot and is more than simply a psychological strut designed to enable us to see another side of our heroine, which is the mistake many writers make with their supporting cast.

The arrest and trial structure of Bloody Mary is an interesting device. The middle of the book climaxes where most other authors would end, and the resulting aftermath ratchets up the tension once more until the final pages where Konrath manages to show his mastery of this genre by delivering a satisfying and suitably adrenaline-fuelled finale.

Konrath knows what he is writing: an escapist cop adventure where we get to hate the bad guy and care for the hero(ine). He manages to hit that escapist tone, keep the plot rolling and still shocks the reader with the crimes of his violent antagonist. Going inside the mind of a killer is an over-used tactic these days and one might mark Konrath down a few points for doing that, but when the writing is this good, you don’t care. In fact, by switching from Jack’s first person narrative to the distanced present third-person narration of Fuller’s gruesome and psychotic escapades Konrath manages to give a sense of pace to the proceedings. These glimpses into Fuller’s mind are never too deep, thank goodness; Konrath is smart enough to keep his third person narration detached from Fuller, the impersonal nature of the prose making his crimes even more chilling. This dual narrative also makes us, as an audience, aware of the terrible obstacles Jack must face. This foreknowledge of our killer’s intentions make the reader suitably anxious for Jack to succeed. It’s the literary equivalent of screaming at the cinema screen when we’ve just been shown the killer’s standing behind that door. We scream when Jack makes a wrong turn and cheer when she does the right thing, makes that one connection that takes her closer to bringing down this clearly loopy serial killer.

There’s some real suspense in the structure of Bloody Mary and it helps that we come to care for the characters caught up in the killer’s horrific games. It’s a balance of rollicking plot and endearing characters many writers find hard to pull off.

Are there problems? Well, some people will probably say this kind of thing has been done before and that’s true. Serial killers and procedural thrillers have been done to death, but for every poorly written, badly plotted, thinly characterised piece of nonsense that gets released along these lines there’s a book like Bloody Mary which is well written, brilliantly executed entertainment. It’s a little irreverent at times, sure. It’s not exactly a thematically deep work, either. There is some discussion over the matter of responsibility a killer has, especially when he is suffering from a medical condition, but that is swiftly passed over and it seems Konrath is saying, screw the medical opinion, some people are just plain bad. But that discussion is hardly the point of the novel and is explored only on a surface level. This is not to say that Bloody Mary isn’t an intelligent book. It is, but its smarts aren’t on an important level. After all, this is a commercial thriller not a door stop volume by Dostoyevsky. For a hit of joyous escapism which doesn’t insult your intelligence, Bloody Mary is just the ticket.

Bloody Mary is a fast-moving comic thriller, the kind of crowd-pleasing, slickly packaged joy that deserves to sell fast and sell well. Konrath’s prose is easy to read and full of character. His sense of timing (both with jokes and with plot twists) is impeccable. And, above all, he’s given us a wonderfully endearing protagonist with Jack. I’d love to end this review with a cocktail related joke, but that’s the cheat’s way out. Instead, I’m just going to raise my glass (filled with mineral water, of course) and propose a toast to Jacqueline Daniels. Here’s to the next round.