Review: "The Longest December" by Richard Chizmar

 

“The Longest December” by Richard Chizmar Cemetery Dance, 2023   Richard Chizmar’s crime novella, “The Longest December”—which is a revised and expanded version of Chizmar’s 2016 story, “A Long December”—is an original and inventive take on the serial killer tale. Bob Howard is a middle-aged sales rep living the suburban dream with a son in college and his marriage, to the beautiful Katy, comfortable and rewarding. But his carefully curated life is shattered when a detective knocks on his door on an early December morning asking about Bob’s best friend and next-door neighbor, James Wilkinson. Wilkinson, a part-time history lecturer at a local University, is suspected in a series of killings dating back years. Bob and Katy insist the police have made a mistake. Wilkinson has been their neighbor for eight years and he is their son’s honorary godfather. And he, Wilkinson, has never shown any behavior to suggest he may be a killer. Of course, Wilkinson has disappeared—which makes him look guilty—and the news media pick up the story with frenzied zeal. “The Longest December” is a bullet of a crime thriller with a psychological element—could Wilkinson have played Bob and Katy for so long, and would he come back and hurt them now?—wrapped in a tense and atmospheric narrative. Chizmar’s sense of pacing is alarmingly perfect but the tale’s essence is the intrinsic suspense as the reader watches Bob circle the truth of what James Wilkinson truly is, on both an emotional and intellectual level, moving from denial to fear and then to something altogether different. “The Longest December” is a thrilling tale with a little Alfred Hitchcock and the film Seven blended into Chizmar’s own secret sauce. And it really works! “The Longest December” was published as one-half of a “double” with Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s story, “A Face in the Crowd.”

Check out A Face in the Crowd / The Longest December at Amazon—click here for the hardcover.