Criminal Minds 1020: A Place at the Table

The episode opens with an old-time recording of Jingle Bells being played as the camera takes in a well-appointed house full of antiques, ending on a push into a family portrait where pointedly zero people are smiling.

We then see that the furniture has been upset by a struggle! The cops enter, are startled by a cat, and then notice the blood trail that the cat left on the carpet! They follow it into the dining room, where the family's mother, grandmother, and two of the children have been tied up and slaughtered at the dining room table!

Then it's over to Greg's house, where he's thanking his sister-in-law for looking after a field trip after his day off was canceled by this brutal mass murder! He notices that she's troubled by something, but is too preoccupied to do anything about it! Has she finally decided - after five years - that being a live-in nanny to her nephew isn't a fulfilling life, or is something else going on?

In the briefing room, they do a virtual walkthrough of the crime scene for some reason. Like, I have no idea why they're doing this. Bethesda is a one hour drive from Quantico if you have the ability to run sirens, which they do. What could possibly be so time-sensitive that they need a video feed right now?

It's not like they're deciding whether or not to take the case - the mother of the family was an heiress, obviously they've been called in. Why aren't they already there? Unless they want to do a jump scare where they see something surprising through the video feed? Of course, that can't happen, because they'd have secured the house before phoning the FBI.

Oh my god, that's exactly what happens. The other son runs through the back of the frame and is tackled by the cops, so they can do a found footage thing where the camera is kicked and suddenly we go to a snowy screen! Because that's a thing that still exists.

So, anyhow - family murdered at a dinner table, son as a suspect, Holiday music in the background - I'm calling it now, this is an adaptation of the book Scavenger, which I have a very complicated relationship with. Seriously... it's... troubling. Then again, this could be a complete coincidence, because the father wasn't also killed, and I was so traumatized by Scavenger that I'm seeing it everywhere!

Let's find out if it's a rip-off, after the credits!

Scavenger Part 2 - The Evidence That Wasn't

Scavenger is terribly written. I think I've established that well enough. There's one part I didn't focus on in that last article, however, and it is, in its own way, the absolute worst part of awful novel Scavenger. The big twist.

Okay, quick refresher - Mark killed three families and made it look like the work of a deranged serial killer so that people wouldn't notice him killing his own family, who he hated. Then Scavenger picked up the torch and murdered his own family, and then a fifth family a few months later, hoping to draw law enforcement attention away from himself. Both attempts succeeded, and then Mark wrote a book about the murders. Scavenger read the book and became convinced - based on the text within, that Mark was the original 'Family Man', whose crimes he had copied.

Then, for reasons that aren't ever entirely clear, Scavenger decides he wants to expose Mark's crimes via an elaborate game that has him running to the various crime scenes and getting punched repeatedly by a giant in a duster.

Again, it is not a good book.

Scavenger goes to an FBI agent who was obsessed with the case with his theory about Mark, and enlists the man's help in his scheming. It seems that Mark accidentally revealed something while writing the book that identified him to Scavenger as the perpetrator - and that information is convincing enough to the FBI agent that he's willing to risk his career (as well as imprisonment - the scheme is hugely illegal) to go along with Scavenger's plan.

What is the information? Prepare yourselves, because when I actually read the book for the first time years ago, I re-read the passages explaining Scavenger's flash of insight a dozen times, hoping to make sense of it, but all I ever managed to do was give myself a headache. So here it is:

Scavenger! It's awful!

I want to talk about Scavenger, and why I consider it one of the worst novels I've ever read.  A 2000 novel by Tom Savage, Scavenger tells the story of one Mark Stevenson, who is offered the chance to play a madman's game in the hopes of discovering the truth behind the murder of his entire family a decade earlier. Perfectly fine premise, but it gets into trouble by being a Tom Savage novel. What do I mean by this?

Well, to be blunt, Tom has a bad habit of cheating. He doesn't outright lie to the reader creating plot holes, he practices something far more insidious - his most effective trick is to have an unexpected character turn out to a sociopathic killer right at the end of the story with no lead-up to hint at the reveal. He banks on his audience being so shocked by the pulled rug that they don't go back and think too hard about the suddenly-evil character's actions and thoughts in the rest of the book. A great writer will fill their books with tiny hints leading up to the reveal, and bits of dialogue or cast-off thoughts and actions that only make sense in retrospect. Tom Savage is not a great writer, and his manipulative practices ensure that his books can only be read once - when you go back, knowing full well which character is the villain, their actions and motivations invariably make no sense whatsoever.

A perfect example of this is his novel Valentine - it involves a woman being stalked by a psychotic man from her past. It features chapters told from the point of view of a stalker, stalking her. Then, for the shocking reveal, we discover that the stalker stalking her was a completely benign figure just looking to get revenge on the killer, who'd also murdered his sister some time previously. While this doesn't seem like cheating on its face, and makes for an effective twist, going back and reading the book will reveal that the stalker's behaviour and thoughts make absolutely no sense if he's not the story's villain. If he didn't have any ill intentions towards the main character, there's absolutely no way for him to behave and think the way he does.

Which brings me to Scavenger, the most egregious example of Tom's cheating. I struggled to figure out the best way to review this book - it's difficult to explain exactly how bad it is without going through the entire plot, and if I'm doing that, I might as well just encourage people to go ahead and read the darned thing. Seeing as that's the last thing I want, I'm instead going to lay out the sequence of events as cleanly as possible - hopefully proving that when looked at dispassionately (at first, there will be commentary as well), the events of the book will be self-evidently idiotic. It's not going to be the cleanest of reviews, though, as I'll have to jump back and forth in timelines to put things in the most helpful order, and of course I'll have to spoil every surprise the book has to offer right away, so if anyone is interested in reading it, they should go and do that now, before returning to the review proper.

All aboard, then.