Review: Not what I hoped for...
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 10 9, 2012
I looked forward to reading Two Weeks in the South of France, written by David Christie, because it sounded like a mystery full of fun and in a beautiful setting. Instead it turned out to be a little over two-hundred pages of poor dialogue, unbelievable characters and confusing twists and turns that added up to a huge let-down. The basic storyline involves Chris's absentee father getting murdered and it's up to Chris to retrieve the body from France and tie up some loose ends in the mysterious business his father ran. Seemingly secondary to the story is finding out who killed his father and why. There is absolutely no flow to the story at all and nearly every scene was entirely unrealistic. One scene in the morgue when Chris identifies his father's body is so strange that I began to wonder if perhaps Chris had bipolar disorder because none of his emotions made sense and flipped around constantly, never being appropriate for the situation. Add to that a rather seedy relationship started with his father's much younger girlfriend, and a female detective who has the weirdest, off-the-cuff behaviours of any detective characters I've ever read, and I just ended up with a headache. This was all during the first three days of Chris's trip to France and it didn't get any better. I just stopped caring about the characters and hoped that Chris would use his return ticket back to San Francisco as soon as possible to save me some boredom.