This book not exactly a sequel to The Interpretation of Murder but it does use the same protagonist and in a sense it gives us the “what Stratham Younger did next” vibe. Set in the 1920’s in New York, it follows two lines: the life of a police detective who witnessed the 1920’s terrorist attack on Wall Street and Stratham Younger, trying to unravel a plot against a young radiochemist. The plot was great, if you ignore the ridiculous parts of it and the shaky science bits, it was fun. But something happened to the book. I’m going to guess it happened at the printers, they accidentaly added to the book another book, called “Memoirs from WWI”. If that’s not what happened then I can’t explain why he spent easily 150 pages telling us, in a very preachy manner, about the horrors of the First World War. It didn’t add to the plot, it didn’t add to the experience and frankly it was tedious.
The other thing that happened to that book was Stratham Younger turned from a fun nice person to an arrogant jerk that deserves to be run over by a train. I hated everything about him. The worst part was that it wasn’t as if Rubenfeld took his character and then imagined the emotionally scarred version of it and tried to reproduce it. He took his character, shredded it, started again and gave him the same name. Seriously.
The other thing that had bothered me about Jed Rubenfeld before is the outlandish plots. There are parts where his story is simply unbelievable. In a way, he writes such hard to believe story-lines that when he brings out the outlandish spin you are unsurprised because there is nothing that can surprise you anymore.
The nice treat in his books is always the Freud cameos that appear. Now, I know most of Freudian psychology has been disproved but he still looks very cool in a historical novel! That was really a treat. In terms of other characters, Colette was possibly the most confusing character I’ve read: so liberal and yet so sexist at the same time! It was all a bit confused... The only decent character was Detective Littlemore (who I imagine to look like Paul Giammati a la The Illusionist). He was a well written, well thought out character. He is the only character I truly enjoyed reading about!
Enjoyed it: So so.
Read again: Not really.
275 days remaining - 17 books down, 1 unfinished, 83 left.
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