Taking Lives appears to be an attempt to combine a crime thriller with a mainstream novel. That's a noble objective that can produce wonderful results. Unfortunately in this case the two genres fail to fuse.

For the first sixty or so pages Taking Lives is a straight serial killer novel. It starts with two young men on a bus in America. When one of them is killed, the other decides on a whim to take his identity. This is just the first of a series of identity shifts as the young man travels the world killing people then taking their lives.

It's not an original idea but is an interesting one. It holds for the first rapid-paced chapter, then you start wondering how Pye is going to fill a whole novel. There are only so many variations on the basic theme.

At the perfect moment, Pye throws the plot in a new direction. The viewpoint changes from the killer to a first person account by one John Costa.

Costa works for a museum. The life that the killer has recently taken is that of Christopher Hart. Unfortunately for the killer, the real Hart recently stole some valuable antique drawings from the museum. Costa - who never met the real Hart - is sent to track him down and recover the papers. Arriving in Portugal he finds himself unknowingly dealing with a killer.

It sounds like an excellent setup, full of possibilities for ironic tension as Costa tries to put pressure on a serial killer he believes to be a harmless academic. Unfortunately the story quickly begins to fall apart and never recovers.

The majority of the book is written in the first person from Costa's viewpoint. This gives Pye technical problems. Costa obviously has no idea what 'Hart' is thinking and planning, things that it is dramatically essential we the readers know. To get round this Pye resorts to telling us things Costa "discovered later", usually from police reports or from 'Hart' himself. This is a very awkward mechanism that clunks audibly. It also destroys the narrative flow by constantly throwing our thoughts forwards beyond the end of the story.

The other problem with Costa as viewpoint character is that he simply isn't very interesting. Pye spends a lot of time on his relationships and his exploration of his father's past. For me these are not especially gripping and it's difficult to care.

Pye though does care. It begins to seem that Costa was the character he wanted to write about in the first place. 'Hart' is reduced to an incidental character Costa happens to become involved with. Potentially interesting themes abound - life as art, the creative process as applied to self, betrayal and forgiveness. Unfortunately without a decent story to hang them on these become mere intellectual fluff.

So we are left with a novel that starts as an interesting psychological study of a serial life taker then degenerates in to a fairly dull portrait of a very dull life. The crime elements just feel out of place.

To be fair, Pye does provide us with that rare and precious thing - a good ending. The first and last sixty pages of Taking Lives are excellent. It's a shame about the two hundred and fifty in between.

Update March 2004:
So, Taking Lives is now a film starring Ethan Hawke and Angelina Jolie. Despite my reservations about the book, the film has potential.

Any "book of the film" necessarily cuts huge amounts from the original. In this case, if they've cut the middle of the book and filmed the beginning and the end it could be quite good. I wait to see.