The Madman’s Tale (John Katzenbach) sounds like a pretty promising premise. The story is told through the eyes of schizophrenic former patient Francis “C-Bird” Petrel, who is writing anecdotes from his past on his apartment wall and slowly descending back into insanity. When a murder takes place in the Western State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, the authorities automatically assume a particular inmate is guilty. However, profiler Lucy Jones, is not convinced. The case holds way too many similarities to a series of murders she has been investigating and so she enters the hospital in the hope of finding out who is pretending to be insane in a world populated by the mentally unsound.

From the word go we are expected accept that Lucy would logically and professionally decide to use Francis and another patient known as Peter, The Fireman, as co-investigators and that the hospital authorities would not only agree to this but also that they’d allow them to be involved in the questioning of other patients. Even if you can suspend your disbelief, the back-stories are clumsy and confused and to some degree unnecessary. Either develop them properly or bin them!

While it is initially excitingly voyeuristic looking into the hospital and all the weird and wonderful neuroses and behaviours exhibited by the patients, the story moves at the pace of a snail in a salt factory and the time that Katzenbach should have spent actually working the potentially delightfully screwed up attraction he introduces between Lucy and The Fireman (and then ignores), is spent beating us over the head with endless descriptions of the same behaviour.

By the time the story came to its inevitable conclusion with its big “twist” I was so bored didn’t care what happened anymore. The plot had gotten so out of control that they might as well have had aliens dropping a nuke on the hospital because it would have been equally believable.

If Katzenbach had actually gone with exploring the disastrous repercussions of the story he cobbled together rather than tying them together in a way that would make Disney proud, it could have been a very compelling read but it feels like a cowardly copout fuelled by laziness.

In conclusion:

-    If you want to get your weirdo fix, go and read One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest again instead
-    If you want your serial killer crime fix, Go and watch Se7en again instead
-    If Katzenbach wants to write something he expects us to believe could realistically happen he should write something realistic. Otherwise he should move on to fantasy.
-    If you’d rather not waste however long it takes you to get through a 600 page novel, don’t bother with this one.

1/5