Review 581: Old King

Old King by Maxim Loskutoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The book starts in 1976 from Salt Lake City and quickly moving to Lincoln, Nebraska where most of the book takes place. We follow mainly three men, Duane who had to leave SLC as he was broken from his wife giving him divorce papers. Then there is the hermit Ted Kaczynski, yeah that guy who builds bombs and mails them to people. And there is Nep, a Postal Service inspector trying to catch this bomber.

For most of the book it is told from Duane’s point of view. We get much shorter passages from the other two men. We also get the POV of other characters. Jackie is the lone female voice in this book. She’s divorced and a long time native of this place, while some of the others are more recent transplants, even if they arrived a decade ago. Lincoln is almost like another character, a very small town in the middle of the woods, some of which is being clear cut.

Menace is laced through the book with Ted’s nefarious actions. The book opens with a bomb that goes off when a security guard at a computer lab in a university campus goes off. It doesn’t kill him. Ted is intent in killing someone. It’s eerie. Never does he become a sympathetic character.

The timeline and how things move forward in the book is a bit confusing. It may say years later, then Duane had been here a year…something like that. I just decided to go with the flow and not pay much attention to it closely.

Overall this was a decent read.