Posts tagged review

Next up was a book which seems to be the “cool” thing to be reading at the moment, give or take a year - I’m a bit late to the party. I’d been recommended this book by a wide variety of people, and it appeared to fall into my broad interests as a crime/murder mystery so it wasn’t really difficult choosing it as the second book to read.

I really liked it. It was hard to get into at first, the start is.. tough going. Lots of intricate details of Swedish politics, corporate infighting and setting the backstory, but with not very much apparent connection to what you go into the book expecting to be the main plot. Then suddenly out of nowhere, everything gets interesting. The political, whistleblower drama suddenly becomes a locked room mystery, where the room is an island. From that point on I was hooked. 

My only criticism was that it all felt a bit clinical, I didn’t find myself getting completely drawn into the world in the book - I was just enjoying reading a story from the outside. I wonder if perhaps this is a side effect of the language as a translation, if only I could read Swedish and then I might know. A lot of the time the language felt functional rather than crafted? This all sounds incredibly pretentious and like I know what I’m talking about. I don’t.

All in all a cracking story, the big reveal was interesting and it’s bitten me to the extent I’m now 100 pages into the second in the series. I’ll report back when I’m done.

5/5

It’s taken me a weekend to finish this in fits and starts, I was caught between intrigue and wishing it would just hurry up and get to the point in equal measures. I don’t know whether if I’d read it in one sitting rather than in (sometimes as short as 15 minutes) bursts, but the twists in the last quarter of the book left me more confused than convinced. Particularly the very final twist which didn’t seem to actually make any logical sense.

The story was fairly absorbing but the characters were rather two dimensional. The series focusses on a group of women in powerful ‘crime solving’ positions, a police officer, an attorney, a crime reporter and mortuary doctor. Unfortunately they hadn’t yet formed in this first story, and even when they did it felt unnecessary and like their group only existed because the dust cover blurb said they should.

I don’t think I can judge James Patterson on this one book so I’ll try something else and come back to make my mind up, but I hope in future stories I actually feel something for the characters - the primary investigator in this story was suffering from a potentially life threatening condition and believed she was going to die, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

3/5

Just been to see Iron Man 2 at the cinema and I have to say I really enjoyed it! I went into it not knowing what to expect since I’d not seen (nor read anything about) the first one. Thankfully the backstory wasn’t especially… complex, and it didn’t take long before I was up to speed. Any film which contains fighting, flying robots, a drunken robot birthday brawl to the soundtrack of Robot Rock, a historic F1 race round Monaco being interrupted by a super villain, and Robert Downey Jr, has my vote.

The historic motorsport event was brilliantly ridiculous and I was pleased to notice that the official entry list showed the British driver in the number 2 position named “Chapman”. I think that has to be a Lotus reference given the appearance of a very JPS-alike car in the race. Very nice touch from an American production.