Review: An interesting, somewhat unusual, and very complicated crime story
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 21, 2012
It took me a while to get into this book, but once in, I liked it and read it straight through, in one long read.  As others have pointed out, the main character, John Ray, is a complicated, appealing man, but it takes the whole story to find out who and what he really is.  Even at the end of the story, I was not 100% sure that I knew the "real" John Ray.  It was unclear to him, and to the reader, through most of the book, what really happened and why.  We follow along with John Ray (and a cast of unusual characters) as he tries to figure out "whodunnit".  It's personal - his best friend is the jailed suspect in this gruesome murder case and his current girlfriend is a cop in the unit assigned to solve this crime.My main dissatisfaction is the number of British terms used that I wasn't familiar with, but needed to know, in order to understand what was going on; "googling" the term sometimes helped.  And there were a few somewhat suddenly appearing, ill-defined characters to keep track of and figure out what their role was and is - in John's past and present.The reader finds out, in the end, the "who, what, and why", but I was somewhat frustrated as the story unfolded.  I found myself using the "search this book" feature on my kindle to go back and reread scenes where the character was introduced, to find out who some characters were, what their relationship was, and now is, to John Ray - and to the crime itself.  I'm not sure I really, finally, understand John Ray.  I actually read some of the final pages over a couple of times to get a better sense of a couple of characters.In the end, I still wasn't absolutely sure that I understood who and what John Ray was, is, and will be.  The good thing about that is that I WANT to know more about John Ray and will likely read the next book in the series to find out.