My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz DNF 61%
As with all my reviews, I'm sharing my subjective opinions with you. This is probably a good book, just not one for me. I didn't hate it. You see how far I got into it before deciding that I didn't care to keep reading it just to say I finished it. Basically, there were too many unpleasant characters and the story too long for my taste. Indeed, I didn't even connect with the first person narrator protagonist enough to care how things turned out. Plus, at almost 600 pages (!), this murder mystery story runs way too long for a mystery. Even at calling a day at 61% mark, I basically finished a reasonable mystery story.
All those quibbles aside, I will say that it is an interesting book, with an interesting premise. More about that in a minute. This is the third book in the series, so a lot had happened to our narrator in the previous two books, which is brought up, and plays a part in this story, but I don't think it was necessary to read those two previous books to enjoy this one. The missing past wasn't my problem.
The first person narrator in this story is a freelance book editor. Returning to England from a less than successful love affair, she accepts an assignment to edit a book from an troubled young author. He had two unsuccessful books published by the publishing house she had previously been a senior member of. This author is the grandson of a famous children's book author, who was, in life, a very mean and domineering woman. She kept all her children close to her at the said Marble Hall by the ties that bind, i.e. the prospect of inheriting her vast fortune. This author had a terrible childhood, and is really messed up. Nevertheless, he was hired to continue the detective series of an author who had been murdered in one of the previous books, who was another unpleasant fellow, I gather.
As we go along with the story, the editor begins to realize that just like the murdered original author of the mystery series, this new author is using people he knows as the models for his characters in the murder mystery story he is writing, and perhaps events that happened at Marble Hall as well...
What makes this story interesting is that we, as the reader, get to read this murder mystery he is writing a he is writing it. We are introduced to the "real life" characters and then we read the first 30,000 word section of the novel that he has turned in to the editor, right along with her. At this point, the story we are reading shifts to the story he is writing, set in a mansion on the south coast of France. After finishing that installment, we switch back to the present day. The editor, being familiar with previous events, becomes concerned, as I said, that the author is using real people he knows as characters in his murder story, perhaps family members, which could cause a lot of trouble down the road for both her and the writer. So she starts looking closer into his childhood, involving the reader in a second mystery running parallel to the fictional one. We then get another 10K-15K slice of the book before returning to the real-life mystery. An interesting concept, but at the cost of words. Lots of words.
The problem with this story for me is that I really don't like stories with unpleasant characters, and the author of the mystery story is this story is that in spades. He's a jerk who had just punched his wife in the story at the place were I decided to call it quits. Plus murder mysteries are not really my cup of tea, especially when there are two or more murders in a story in order to cover up the first murder, as in the fictional story within this story. That is a trope that I absolutely hate. And to top it all off, I think I had figured out who the murder was in the fictional story as well. It seemed almost too obvious, so when the editor didn't pick up on the clue... I guess that was just enough for me to call it quits. I didn't care any more. Unlike my wife, I don't force myself to keep reading something I have to force myself to read. Especially since I have two other books waiting for me to read.
I have another mystery by Horowitz on hold at the library, and I will give it a try when it comes in, since it is in another series, and as I said, I had no complaints about the writing; only the characters.
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