A Gentle Murderer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

A Gentle Murderer
by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

ISBN-13: 9781728271958
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Released: March 7th 2023

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
On a hot Saturday night in Manhattan, Father Duffy sits in a confessional, growing alarmed as he listens to the voice of a distraught young man who speaks of bloody hair and a dead woman and a compulsion to do things with a hammer that he does not understand. The priest tries to persuade the man to confess to the police, but the killer flees, still clutching the hammer.

The next day, Father Duffy learns that a high-class call girl on the East Side has been savagely murdered, and no suspect has been found. As he searches for the disturbed young man who he fears will kill again, cerebral New York Police detective Sergeant Ben Goldsmith takes the lead in the investigation of the call-girl murder, racing against the clock to catch a very clever killer who, when enraged, cannot control his need to swing a hammer.


My Review:
A Gentle Murderer is a mystery that was originally published in 1951. Father Duffy investigated the killer's past to try to track him down in the present. He learned that the killer's father was an abusive drunk while the mother was "too affectionate." I'm still not sure if that simply meant that she babied him or if she molested him. Duffy found plenty of reasons to believe the killer would kill again, but he didn't feel like he could share his knowledge with the police because it started out in a confessional. He's determined to find the man and convince him to turn himself in. At the same time, the police (mainly Detective Goldsmith) processed the crime scene, questioned people, and otherwise tried to identify and track down whodunit. He did a fine job even without Duffy's knowledge, and their paths converged at the end.

We know whodunit from the start, though, as the final point-of-view character was the killer. Women took one look at him and wanted to mother him, giving him (often free) room and board so he could pursue his attempts at writing poetry. He killed women he felt were leading other women astray or who were having affairs, so he seemed to feel that they deserved it. But he did know killing was a sin, thus the confession. His choices fed his desire to murder as he was often a temptation to lonely women. There was this weird "I want to mother him and have sex with him" vibe going on with his potential victims. Anyway, knowing he was close to killing again did add suspense, but I think I would have liked the mystery better without his viewpoint.

There was some bad language. There were no actual sex scenes. Any violence was minimally described, so it wasn't gory. Overall, I'd recommend this mystery to fans of "golden age" mysteries.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.