Review: Decent Though Too Diffuse Read
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 22, 2014
By halfway through the book, I no longer knew just what the hero's mission was and a bit further on, I no longer cared. More simply, the author introduced multiple generations into the crime scenario so that neither the reader nor the hero was ever particularly clear as to just what the point was. If there was a point. There is a difference between complexity and confusion; the book reflects the latter far more than the former. There is also a problem, never resolved: linking the multiple murders and cases of mayhem, with a single thread as the denouement seeks to do. It never really gels in literary terms nor in terms of a satisfying conclusion.The book does have its virtues in the development of some of its characters and their traits, as well as in the creation of a sense of the confusion the only solution to which requires that the hero keep plugging along through a fog of deceit.Overall, not a book I can unconditionally recommend or condemn. I would not put myself into a situation in which this was the only thing I had to read with more than a few hours of journey ahead. There is too good a chance it won't satisfy to rely entirely on its merits for your reading pleasure; keep something else on reserve---just in case.