In this ninth volume of the series, detective Matt Scudder not only confronts an evil as absolute as any he has yet encountered, but is also forced to accept he is powerless to bring this evil to justice by any means he has yet permitted himself to use. Scudder faces a moral dilemma, and the way he resolves it is both cathartic and unsettling.A brother, convinced his wealthy sister has been murdered by her husband, hires Scudder to collect the evidence to prove it. When Scudder follows the husba...

It goes against my OCD tendencies to read a book series out of order, but the Matt Scudder books aren’t easy to come by for me – so it was Eight Million Ways to Die (read about a million years ago), then The Sins of the Fathers and now this one – I read them as I get them. At least, I haven’t been reading the Dark Tower series out of order or the Game of Throne books. I realize these are PI books and it isn’t that important to keep the order straight, jump in anywhere the water’s fine, but here

A few years ago I was talking to somebody in my cube at work, and the name of the small town I grew up in came up. A woman who worked in the cube across the aisle from mine looked up and said that since I was from that town, that I must know of this other smaller town that was nearby. I laughed and replied that my relatives made up 80% of the population of that town. She asked if I was related to X. He was my second cousin. She was his ex-wife. We had worked across from each other for a year wit...

Matthew Scudder is hired to figure out if a TV anchor man killed his wife. But what does that have to do with a snuff film a friend of Matt's found disguised as the Dirty Dozen at a video store? Scudder really stepped in it this time. The Stettners, and to a lesser extent Richard Thurman, the accused anchor, are perverts and psychopaths of the worst kind, the kind that prey on children. I thought James Leo Motely in the previous Scudder book was the worst villain Block could come up with but I w...

Picking this one up I was not prepared for such a trip into dark and depraved waters. This is more than Scudder has ever gone up against previously and definitely the strongest in the series since Eight Million Ways To Die. While we've moved along in years out of the 80's into the early 90's, New York City continues to be a seething trap of anger and violence and desperation with all those ways to die and Scudder has stumbled upon yet another one. This time, he didn't even go looking for it, not...

I didn’t love this #8 Matthew Scudder mystery by Lawrence Block. I liked parts of it. I loved the first several of them, focused on the psychology/theology of an ex-cop whose life is pretty much in ruins. He’s an alcoholic, and the publisher names these early stories crime novels, but they are really straight-up novels with a developing existentialist theme running through them about this guy who just happens to be a detective with the emphasis on his emotional and physical recovery and not the

A wealthy New York couple, Richard and Amanda Thurman, arrives home at their upscale apartment after a night on the town. Several hours later, Richard punches out 9-1-1 with a pipe tool between his teeth, and the police arrive to find him beaten and tied up in the neighbors' apartment immediately below his own. Amanda Thurman, who was pregnant with the couple's first child, has been raped, beaten and strangled to death. Thurman tells detectives that two men who had burgled the neighbors' apartme...

*3.5 Stars* “Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around.” This year I've realized that I'm not that big of a fan of standard detective series. They get too repetitive and frankly boring after a while. It nearly broke my heart when I realized that I was starting to feel the same way about this book in Lawrence Block's Scudder series, arguably the top of the detective pack. As I read, I started to notice the formula and the trends. Once again,

Writing about child sex abuse and torture, gratuitously FOR PROFIT is sick. Perhaps Block does it to make the reader angry enough to forgive Matt's testosterone-fuelled vengance at the end ?Early on, this book displays the worst kind of graphic sickness: snuff films and child torture. Block did not have to show it so graphically, unless he thought there was a market or profit in it. I fail to see how the graphic presentation of using hedge-clippers to cut off the nipple of a young boy is not men...

Matt Scudder is hired by the brother of a recently murdered woman. He's given the unfortunate task of investigating the husband who is believed by most to have had a hand in her demise. Shortly after taking the job, Matt finds himself drawn back into something that had impacted his life just a few months earlier.Coming off the heels of the 8th Scudder novel in which Matt encounters his most dangerous adversary, Block created an impressive follow up. Block gives Scudder plenty to do here, hitting...

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse may not have the most inspired name, but this 9th entry in Lawrence Block’s inimitable series of novels starring Matthew Scudder—a reformed alcoholic and an ex-dirty-cop who now makes a living as an unlicensed PI—stands as yet another beacon of excellence in a line-up of absurdly high quality mysteries that prove, again and again, the unique literary traits and themes that a well-written genre novel can reckon with unlike any other game in town, and does so in a man...

Matt Scudder's finest outing to date. Potentially also the darkest and most brutal too. As Matt investigates the possibility that a husband murdered his wife he stumbles across a snuff film and all the hell that that entails. Block's descriptive passages are shocking and disturbing and the impact on his protagonist is equally as impressively written. The constant evolution of Scudder as a person is at the heart of all that is good about this series, the further away he gets from the booze the mo...

This is an Advanced Reading Copy of the book and is signed by Lawrence Block.

Matthew Scudder is hired to investigate the death of Richard Thurmans wife which was considered suspicious by one of the investigating police officers and the brother of the deceased wife.The story starts with a boxing match before we find out that is actually the way for Scudder to eyeball his "target". The Scudders stories so far all have in common the pedestrian pace in which you slowly find out what did happen.As it happens Scudder also gets involved in another situation which involves a snu...

I loved and hated this. The writing, the story, the characters, everything really, is great. The problem is Block did too good of a job at portraying some really horrific people. I felt sick to my stomach from about the halfway mark to the end. It's the following day after I finished the book and I still feel a bit queasy. So...WELL DONE, MR. BLOCK!

A Dance At The Slaughterhouse" is the ninth novel in Block's Matthew Scudder series. It is a finely-tuned piece of work and, in it, Scudder meets people so twisted and so evil even he is shocked. You would think that there was nothing left to surprise this battle-hardened man, but there are things people do to each other for amusement and power games that are just truly evil. And, often, the most evil ones are the most charming and the most seductive.At this point in the series, Scudder has give...

This harrowing and chilling book, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, detailing private detective Matt Scudder’s search for the origins of a snuff film, was made even more harrowing and chilling by the variety of stains, spatters, and smears adorning the library book I was reading. The cover illustration portrayed a murder victim’s blood circling down a floor drain, and while I rationally understood that the markings in my book were the typical library leavings of previous borrowers (chocolate finger...

The world is an unforgiving place and for Matt Scudder, it's the very bottom of humanities pecking order that helps him ply his trade. Wallowing in the pits of despair, reformed alcoholic and ex-cop Scudder gets knee deep in the criminal underworld of exploration, false promises, and broken dreams as he tries to solve a rape and murder of which the key suspect is the victim's husband. The case leads him down a dark rabbit hole that shines a light on the snuff film trade. Lawrence Block doesn't d...

This is my second P.I. Matt Scudder book. First class hardboiled fare. Snuff films, Matt's meetings, boxing matches -- it's all in here. Mr. Block has to write some of the smoothest prose in fiction today. Great stuff.

Block pulls no punches in this gritty detective story, with a plethora of unsavory characters. Previously I had only read the first Matthew Scudder book 'Sins of the Fathers' and had not found it very engaging. This one is in a totally different league.Great, sometime disturbing, story that had an unexpected ending. It may be that if I had read the other Matthew Scudder books, and been more familiar with the character, I would not have been so surprised. Based on my enjoyment of this book, it lo...