Catherine (alternativelytitledbooks) - so very behind!'s Reviews > The Nothing Man

All aboard the Unpopular Opinion Express! 🚂

Unfortunately, this is NOT the train ride I expected to be taking after reading this book, I am so sad to say.

Jim Doyle is working as so many former law enforcement officers do---in the supermarket security biz. He is going about his mediocre, cookie-cutter day when he notices a book with a title that makes his blood run cold: The Nothing Man. Jim knows the Nothing Man intimately, you see, possibly better than anyone else---since this is HIS alter ego. Brutal serial killings have taken place over the course of many years, but Jim has lived a double life quite neatly...until now. Eve Black, the only surviving member of a family Jim took out, has taken pen to paper to explore the mystery and bring the facts (and her memories) to the masses. As Jim plunges ahead in the narrative, he fears that Eve may know a lot more than he anticipated and his anonymity may be coming to a vicious end. Can he stop the freight train of truth as it barrels ahead through Eve's words...or is strapped to the tracks with no hope of escape?

This book has been hailed as a psychological thriller...but to be honest, I feel like this was in no way a psychological thriller. We know from the beginning that Jim is the killer, and I don't feel the book 'tricked' me or had any sort of twists really aside from a few minor turns of plot. Every standout psychological thriller I've ever read has ticked those boxes, but this one didn't.

I loved the IDEA of a book within a book...but much like I felt reading snippets of Misery in Stephen King's Misery...the idea was fantastic, but the actual reading material was not. I couldn't understand why people would be gripped by Eve's book at all. To me, it was lots of meticulous detail about the other murders etc. that really didn't even matter to the plot itself. Every time we jumped back into Eve's book, I couldn't wait to get back out of it to see what Jim was going to do next, since that was the true driving force of Howard's Nothing Man itself.

This is the sort of book that true crime junkies will probably LOVE, but I suppose I should have researched it a bit more before starting to read, since that is not at all my passion area. I know this is a super hot topic and there are lots of passionate fans out there, but I am just not one of them. I have no idea why those sorts of things don't appeal to me since I am obsessed with thrillers, but my guess is, like police procedurals, they just aren't my cup of tea.

I completely appreciate what Howard accomplished here, but I was absolutely not the right reader for this book. Please take a look at the fabulous glowing five star reviews out there for this book though, and all credit goes to Catherine Ryan Howard for creativity and a unique premise! Hopefully one of her other books will be a better fit for me...and perhaps a train ride to the Land of Many Stars! 🚅

3.5 ⭐