Review: Ho-Hum
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 14, 2013
Beginning writers are taught "show, don't tell." This run-of-the-mill mystery believes the opposite; why bother to dramatize when you can just say something like, "She was an old woman who tried hard to pass for middle-aged, having been blessed with a young-looking father who had been a captain in the Navy not long after World War II, married not long before the Korean War began. An attractive-enough woman of middle height, tending toward dumpiness, she had been highly educated in abstruse topics, but now wasted her free time on not-very-mysterious mysteries...."A screenwriter recently gave me a piece of advice that Ms. Mortimer ought also to take to heart in constructing her plots: "If they CAN delete the scene, they WILL delete the scene" -- to make room for another commercial, if for no better reason. If adapted for the screen, this novel would make a good ten-minute vignette on "Alfred Hitchcock," but minus the "tell-don't-show" window dressing, there isn't much more than ten minutes of "mystery."