GJ

I have read only one other legal thriller. From the ‘experience' of having read two of them, I don't really get why legal thrillers are called ‘thrillers'. I guess the supposedly thrilling element here is about who trumps the other in bribing, cheating, manipulating and finding loopholes in the law, when the truth is staring at us from the beginning. It's more drama than a thriller.


I felt this book to be very American. Probably because 12 random people were deciding, whether a man should live or die. I've seen this peculiar American thing called jury trials in all those TV shows and movies (and especially loved 12 Angry Men) and have always wondered, why there was no such system in India. (obviously I'm not very politically inclined). And then I read this.

Everything that could go wrong with a jury trial happens in here. Truth and justice loses all meaning.

The spine of the book is racial tension which holds it together pretty well. And I had not much idea about the KKK before this.

I like a good revenge story; like John Wick, when the one good thing in his life is taken, out he goes all in. Carl Lee has kids and family. Why did he have to do this? Then again, I'm no black man in a white majority county. I'm no father and I have no kids. What do I know? Still, I hated how Carl Lee took Jake for granted. Maybe his character was inspired by some doofus Grisham himself had to represent. And I don't know if this ‘braless women who come onto married men' and appreciation for ‘women who don't wear pants', is a 90s thing of the South or a fantasy of the author's.

Anyway, even though it drags us around with boring details and squabbles between lawyers, it gets more horrifying and gut wrenching in the last 100 pages. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. It was...okay.

At first I thought, the topic of interest of this book was so misogynistic to the core, that I'd have to wash it down with some Atwood or Woolf. But then I realized this is just women ‘manipulating' men for financial gain; that men were just clients, and now I'm comfortable.
This book is dripping metaphors all over. It is beautiful, that at the low points in the novel, they were the flimsy rope I caught on to, and prevented this from falling into dnf.
The first half is beautiful, has a strong storyline, puts us inside the head of the lead character. We feel what she feels, hopes what she hopes and it hurts when she gets hurt. Somewhere along the lane she abandons us; leaving us in some corner of her tea party room, to watch her from afar. This didn't make me feel like dropping the book though. The whole thing was like a TV drama, with jealousy, passion, betrayal (and plenty of horny men); just more sophisticated and prettier with all the cute little metaphors.

Ugh..and then bleh.

Summary: A reporter returns to her small home town in Missouri, to investigate the murder of 2 young girls. She realizes her family and old friends were not who she thought they were.

It's ugly. Uncomfortable. Often unnecessarily so. Just for the sake of it.

There is barely a plot. All you need for a story is in the first 2 and last 2 chapters. Everything in the middle is just filler. Dark filler. Everything is wrong. Everybody is awful. It's like something out of X files. Some radiation or something, made a whole town develop a mean streak. A town high on violence.

I don't think it's a badly written book (although there wasn't anything spectacular about the writing). It just wasn't for me. There is not much of a mystery to it, like in Gone Girl. Either you forsee the ending, or even if you don't, you can't really care when you do.

The book is about the people in it. The plot, probably was just a side-effect. And that's absolutely well done. If you like to read about evil deeds and evil people and why they do them, you might enjoy this.

Not feel good. Not one bit. Opposite opposite.

Final book in the trilogy, picks up after Katniss is rescued from the arena. The Mockingjay becomes a symbol of rebellion
Rebels and Capitol fight, people go crazy, people backstab, people die. It's underwhelming, but I wasn't expecting much anyway, after the first two, which I didn't particularly like.

2/3rds of the book is “camera-people” shooting Katniss doing stuff, so that Beetee can broadcast it. Interspersed with Katniss breaking down and going crazy. The whole point of Katniss' character becomes to be a showpiece. Katniss seems pissed off at this. Other readers too don't particularly seem to like this. I have no clue what pushed the author to write her off like that.
I don't know how to feel about an ‘adventure' book where the only characters who seem to be doing something are cameramen and stylists.

Katniss is a puppet. And being mentally disoriented doesn't help either. She takes no decisions. And she isn't even in her element, when she's not in the arena. The only decision she takes in the whole book, comes by the end and that might be the only redeeming factor.

This book is roughly 50% mockingjay propaganda
20% peeta-gale dilemma
20% weird dreams
10% action

It's boring, and you wouldn't be missing much, even if you don't pick it up after the first 2. The things you care about by the end of book 2, the feeling of need for closure - you'll lose it within the first part of this book. It's drab.

If I hadn't expected something like Harry Potter, I'd have given this a 3. I overestimated this book. It has a linear adventure plot, with a not-so-intriguing world-building. And it turned out to be one-dimensional, probably because it was written in the first person. Wouldn't it be incredibly difficult to built a world, in a book written in first person?
And, the plotline seemed to change to suit the interests of the main characters. The ending was obvious from the beginning. It's more of a children's book than YA. I don't understand the hype.

This was a random book I picked on impulse. All I remember from the movie I watched years ago was that there was Will Smith a dog and many zombies. And that's not much of a spoiler.

Imagine, that you are alone in your average sized home, sitting in your porch in broad daylight, drinking coffee. There's no sound at all, except for the birds crying far off and the faint Beethoven record playing from your bedroom. There are no vehicles, no electricity, no people. There are no plans for the day, nothing to look forward to, no one to love. You are alone, the only person alive that you know of, for the past three years. You speak out aloud and your voice sounds strange and unfamiliar. That loneliness is a darkness encompassing your soul.

I honestly did not understand what the author expected to convey through this book. As a sci-fi, it attempts explaining the irrational fears the vampires have. Looking at vampires through sciencey goggles. More than that, I loved the ‘lonely man's trials' part of the story. For either of them, I felt the book to be too short. A rushed work. And I can't stop comparing it to Salem's Lot which did a much better job with vampires in the modern world.

It's not scary, just sad.

To be honest this book didn't produce the effect in me it could have if I had read it a decade or two earlier.
Also I don't understand horror in written form. The only horrifying thing I read here was, the lead's fingers scraping the wallpaper peeling off tiny bits of it. (That and stubbing little toe will be always horrifying depicted in any form - picture or prose)
I loved Jack Torrance. I loved how messed up he was. On edge. Ready to explode any time. I'm tired of perfect characters who act appropriately all the time. Unreasonable flawed idiots give stories many dimensions, making the reader jump sides throughout the novel.

I love established fantasy and realism, but I hate everything in between. So naturally, I hated the villain in the Shining for not setting down the rules. It's not fun when anything can happen.

You can actually read past 2 pages of this book and not fall asleep! Infact pages together. I say so because it has Public Health (SPM) in it. As any medical student would agree, you cant read SPM textbooks without falling asleep in 10 minutes. The explanations are simple and people with no medical background can also understand. Those with a medical background will enjoy it more, because they can actually diagnose as the writer narrates. There are classical presentations, and the author does a great job in painting the pictures of textbook cases in our minds. It speaks from viewpoints of both the patient and the doctor. Some cases will leave us at utmost disbelief. Though a bit outdated, a must read, especially for medical students!

I should seriously start thinking about writing a book. If this thing sells, anything will.

I could write the plot in one page. Reaaalllllly dragging. I was reading one sentence of every page, and understood the whole thing. Feeble plot, with so much unwanted description and repetition.

I would have given this a 3, if not for the conversation with Sunil at the end.
Half of it is philosophy, and maybe because I don't believe in being in love even before talking to a person, I didn't enjoy large parts of it. It just felt so childish.
For a better concept of love, read Road Less Travelled.
There were some sentences in the sea of philosophy, i appreciated. Hence 2 stars.

“When our friends confess they want to kill us, we have to go...“
This beautiful piece of fiction is presented as from the memories of a child. Thinly veiled with humor and peppered with feminism throughout, it's quite a engaging read.
I was surprised that being an Indian and having read many Holocaust novels, I missed this.
[I don't think this book can have spoilers, everybody knows what it is about. Still I have not included important plot points]
The only time we think of Gandhiji is on Oct 2. This book is set in an era when Nehru and Mountbatten were street-talk and gossip. It changed the one-dimensional view I had of Gandhiji.
“He's a politician yaar, it's his business to suit his tongue to the moment”
The innocent and sometimes idiotic eloquence of the common people, the author's words are at times so cozy, I feel like curling up into them.
“The motherliness of Mother.., while it is there it is all-encompassing, voluptous. Hurt, heartache and fear vanish. I swim, rise, tumble, float, and bloat with bliss”
Her choice a words, and poetic alliteration.
“....with affected affection, purposefully purposeless, massaging Masseur”, beautiful imagery - of the phulka swelling with trapped air, the marching british soldiers as giant caterpiller, the mob as a bestial creature, Sharbat Khan cycling down the drive like a mountain receding, comparing toddler Adi to mercury (that's so apt, why hasn't anybody done that before? It's slick and swift, that is escapes grasp, yet so satisfying and beautiful to watch)

This is written as if from memories of a child, but the memory and what the child felt is so intact that, we don't feel, that it is retrospective. We feel as if we are travelling forward with her, most of the time.
“The next morning Ayah wakes me up ‘when it's still night'.”

The naivety of thinking the lion would eat her, but the sense to know that, the thin man with the thin leash cannot control the lion.

Lenny's foray to rural India, to religious differences - religious jokes and Ayah's selective humor sense to them. Suddenly everything around her is labelled and classified.
Along the way somebody says “It's their fight..if need be we'll protect our Muslim brothers with our lives!” It doesn't take long before they start killing each other.
Subtle changes in behaviour, the discrimination long before the exodus actually marked the beginning of partition.
Once, men smoking hookah stood outside the Gurudwar, waiting for the rest...

Lenny notices the differences, the changed world, how the complexion of the evening changes after a few words are exchanged.
“I close my eyes. I can't bear to open them: they will open on a suddenly changed world.”
Did the ICM transform, or was his character just revealed?
The violence - slowly and all at once descended on Lahore. Lenny compares the mobs and fires to the procession and fire in her kitchen, because she has nothing else to compare it to.
Ranna's story is the most horrible part.
“A boy wakes up from a dark room filled with dead bodies, he wiggles out of them to land in a knee-deep viscous fluid. The dead bodies blocking the entrance had created a pool of blood. He sticks to the shadows of the mud walls, steps over mangled everday faces, go the the kitchen next door, finds stale bread that he crams into his mouth....”
It's a wonder 10 years later a generation of psychotic serial killers weren't born.

The horrors, the dead bodies on the road side in gunnybags, trains with all passengers killed and breasts cut off, and the child marriages on the background going on as usual, cresecent shaped scar on Ranna's head, the Bias full of dead bodies, villagers plan to fight the mob is to get women inside huts, and give them kerosene to burn themselves, and men keeping away the mob until they have time for that.

This is not a book about the exodus (which is explained as Ranna's story briefly). It is about Lenny's experience, the changes around her, and her change of the view of the world, brought on by the partition.

God-mother's character and ICM are worth writing an essay on.

This book would be a good investment of your time. Don't skip it.

If you take a ball of dough, and pull it in different directions, you will get an unshapely mass. Pull too much and you might get a piece of dough entirely disconnected from the main ball of dough.
This book is something like that. It has been pulled in too many directions, some plots seem absolutely unnecessary. I skipped through the whole mob part.
The characters are so stereotypical, that I can predict what the characters are going to say. Especially, Senator Butler, Tony and Daniel. On the other hand, the ending was totally unpredictable, it couldn't be more anticlimactic.
If nothing, atleast likable characters would've made me stick to the story, the way stupid TV series hook me. But no, the author managed to make characters lack emotion or character, that I couldn't care less. I flitted through the pages, trying to make sense, when my brain kept on telling me to move on. Sigh of relief on completion.
I have a toxic relationship with Robin Cook's books. I hate them, because they show both the sides and reveal the mystery(?) by half of the book. Now we have a bird's eye view of both sides playing stupid games, trying to get or escape the other, with a near death experience or something of the sort near the end. Yet I keep on finding his books somewhere. Doing the same thing, expecting different results. Hmph.

People hating this book, hate it “most ardently.” Essays of reviews on how shitty this book is, and i was diappointed that I'd got this from a thrift store before reading the reviews.
It had some unexpected plot twists, but sort of an anticlimactic ending.
I felt that the crux of the storyline was diluted by italian renaissance paintings and buildings and artists. I was jumping paragraphs in the later half of the book, cuz if I didn't do that, it would have inspired me to stop and never come back again, and I really wanted to know how it ended.
So when you find overwhelming information tugging your eyelids down, skip through the pages; the story is not that bad.

I have read very few Agatha Christie novels. I dont't know if all of them have the same pattern..
In part one, she arranged different characters like long thin threads next to each other, clean and distinct, in the next part she mangled all of them together, that I could barely follow the connections...throw in a few red herrings here and there, towards the end I felt this was going to be an obscure unsatisfactory ending, that sprouted mid story - but no! everything was carefully crafted beginning to end and kind of veiled in plain sight. Awesome read.

I have forgotten the last time I read a book so beautiful. It's a cliché adjective, but it is appropriate.

Call of the Wild is a short novel set in the 1890s during the Klondike Gold Rush. Since it involved climbing through a lot of snow, people needed dogs, for transportation of goods as well as themselves. Dogs that were sold, abducted and stolen were subjected to months of toil and cruelty. And one of those poor souls was the main character of the story, Buck.

I have no particular liking or dislike for animals. I don't mind them being around me, but I don't go around petting them. I expected this to be a story heavily revolving around the dog's perspective and picked up this book just to see how this guy could fill so many pages, with the story of a dog; the content was bound to get repetitive. This is one of the books, I thought I wouldn't like, but ended up loving. It is very unusual.

The author often went outside the perspective of the dog - you wouldn't realize the pages turning, and there's a certain freshness and energy to the story throughout.

After the sudden change of circumstances in Buck's life, in the first chapter which heralds the transformation of a pampered pet into a beast; there is a disillusionment - and the new reality filled with a chain of transient, cruel, owners(with clubs as a means of ‘discipline') teaches him the ‘law of club and fang'.

The first part of his journey is about survival. The second part is his life with his final and favorite owner.
*The third and final is the Call of the Wild.

If I start describing them, the review might end up longer than the book. I'd rather point out two aspects of the book I especially liked.

1. The author is a master in setting a scene.
This is when Buck is in a fight with Spitz, another dog.
“Spitz was untouched, while Buck was streaming with blood and panting hard. The fight was growing desperate. And all the while the silent and wolfish circle[other dogs watching the fight] waited to finish off whichever dog went down. As Buck grew winded, Spitz took to rushing, and he kept him staggering for footing. Once Buck went over, and the whole circle of sixty dogs started up; but he recovered himself almost in mid air, and the circle sank down again and waited.”
This brings to my mind the boxing scenes from movies like Raging Bull and Million Dollar Baby. The imagery is so sharp, almost movie-like.
2. The ‘Call' has both figurative and literal meaning.
There is a recurring theme of the transformation of Buck being explained to be due to the Call of the Wild. This figurative ‘call' is the call of his ancestors.
“And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap[ don't you hear the crunch!?] In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always. And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolf-like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.”

The language is simple and beautiful. The novel is short and sweet. The prose is poetic.

“Never was there such a dog.. .....when he was made the mould was broke.”

The whole book is filled with descriptions of Buck, which would leave any reader in awe of this exceptional creature.

Worth multiple reads.

Death | Woman-power | Criticism of mass media

Death is spread out in this story like fog; that gets thicker towards the end.
The fear, uncertainty and inevitability of it, is portrayed through the eyes of someone with a heart of steel.
Do women have hearts of steel? Aren't women too emotional? Do they have the presence of mind to kill a man, like men?
Feminism is a touchy topic, so I am not going there. The white dot appears whiter when the dark background is made darker. Chetna stands apart, grabs our admiration quickly, because all men are stereotypically bad in this book; except maybe one. That is probably necessary, to justify the presence of mind this woman has. Circumstances and experiences changes a person (woman/man) to help them survive. In a world that worked largely against woman, where women are lesser beings (as have been so explicitly mentioned) she had no other way than to rise to the stoic state that she is in. You'd rarely see a man afraid when looking at a woman(if not for the gynocentric laws!). When men in this book see her with a noose, when she mentions how easy it is to kill a man - her calm composure and constant smile seems to give them a fear for life. Imagine sitting near her in real life. The power and presence of mind would make me feel insignificant, small.
Oh and there's media with it's devil face, grinning with it's shiny pointy teeth full on display.
Media is dark comedy, in here.

There are too many stories from her history - that was exhausting. Not much of a plot and a little too long.

A one time read, if you are ready to invest time.
Feminists will love this.

Fiction.
Chess is merely a character, it isn't a story about chess.

There is Czentovic, there is Mr. B and then there is Chess. Chess did something to Czentovic. Chess made him the man he is. Chess also did something to Mr. B. Probably saved his life by almost killing him.
A story about two people with entirely different personalities, both of whom had their life massively altered by chess; playing a game against each other on a cruise.

Intriguing characters and excellent storytelling.

This book is like a bad dream.

A passionate scientist in the early 1800s embarks on a mission to create life from non-life, resulting in disastrous consequences.

All I remember from the abridged version, I read as a kid was a man made a monster and may or may not have made a female companion for him. I'd forgotten that Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster. I haven't watched any of the movies. So I read this with untainted perspective.

For people expecting a sci-fi - there are no technical details. A ‘spark of life' and ‘chemical instruments' are all he needed to make a live being. That was a disappointment. It was clever though. Technicalities would have been pretty soon outdated. It was either none or nonsense. The book is long enough, and I'm glad she chose none.

Passion
The book begins with passion, goes through a lot of emotions and ends in tragedy.
“nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye” -from Robert's letter.

The creature is a direct consequence of the fiery passion of Frankenstein.
“A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father would claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs”
And then when the big guy starts moving, like a switch was flipped, Frankenstein's feelings change. Working on this project for 2 years, and only when it starts moving the dream bubble pops; his heart fills with “breathless horror and disgust”. It was not a deed or a conversation or the countenance that made him loathe it. It was the mere sight of him ‘alive.' When it was merely a science project, a goal to achieve, the ugliness did not matter. Did he foresee the ‘completely understandable havoc', the big guy was gonna wreck? Or was it simply because he was ugly? If the latter is the reason, which is more likely, then that was a pathetic turn of events. He did not even have a chance. With the power to meddle in nature's affairs comes responsibility to deal with the consequences, which I think is the point of the story.

“A human being in perfection ought always to preserve calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory device to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this truth”

It is a socially acceptable psychosis when a scientist puts so much into work or a students prepares really hard for a test and everything around them ceases to matter. Full-on passion levitating you off ground reality is cool until you hit the ground with a thud.

Nature
Throughout the novel, the author spares no words in describing the grandeur of nature surrounding, encompassing our lead character, who is comparatively miniscule - the magnificence of the mountains, the raging avalanches, the torrential downpour, thunder, the winding river and the unrelenting wind, through which this lone man, a dot in the vastness, tries to wade through.
The apparent insurmountability is subtly intended.

Who's right.
Definitely the big guy. What was he to do? He was reasonable. Frankenstein could have atleast made him an infertile partner, they might have happily lived ever after. (If it was in the 21st century there is a slight chance of her going woke and spouting ‘I'm not made for a man' nonsense. Anyway...

How a fully grown ugly looking infant would survive in the wilderness of the society would be an interesting thought experiment. Other than the crash course on everything and anything else, he learns as a peeping tom on a whole family, our big guy has had no parenting. He believes he owes his compassionate personality to his ‘protectors', and if they were soldiers instead of a ‘loving family', he would have had a completely different outlook on life. Frankenstein refuses to believe the effect the nurture on the big guy; he calls him a daemon, a wretch and doesn't believe that his nature will change(?)

Is this just real lifeis this just fantasy
Is any of it real?
If not written as a recording of Robert's experience, this surely could be considered under the heading of ‘unreliable narrator'. Just for the sake of it, if we consider the story without Robert in it, everything following Frankenstein getting sick from too much work could be just dreams and hallucinations.

This book is like a bad dream. Why? Because the story goes everywhere.
There's a guy climbing mountains during rainstorms and avalanches, jailbreaking, enjoying the vista while sailing, a murder investigation, romance, capital punishment and making 8foot tall live being. Like dreams where you are chasing down the bus you just missed one moment, and the next moment you are in class, pantless; it appears incoherent from the outside but coherent from the outside.
And for some reason, the Kindle edition of this book I got was typed(?) twice; the book was over when I thought it was only half way through. I'll admit there was a sigh of relief, because things couldn't get worse, and there was nowhere the novel could go from there. Still unexpected abrupt endings are disappointing.

It's a tragic novel. There are plenty of literary effusions, so much of emotions that might seem a little over the top. The images are sharp, emotions intense, it was a novel idea at the time and there's nothing quite like this since or before this. As a ‘sci-fi' venture during the romantic era, Frankenstein surely deserves the unique status it has in literature.

Imogen Weir - wonderwoman/cleaner lady is everyone's new favorite in town, after running away from a husband who is quite a character.

It's a like a soap opera, written down.
“Imogen stop acting stupid”
“Don't call Imogen stupid, she is a wonderful, intelligent person”
- 2 adults in an argument.

You don't learn anything new about the two lead characters after the first few chapters. So I'll tell, since it won't be spoiling.
Vince is super controlling with serious ocd issues. Imogen at a weak point in her life thought this horrible specimen would be the best choice for her. Realizing her mistake soon enough, she plans an escape.

This theme of the controlling husband bordering on gaslighting could have been better utilized in the plot, to provide a mystery element. This book is no mystery, just mildly thrilling. Very mildly.

Also works as an advertisement for perfumes, clothes, cookware, (and some other french brands of stuff I didn't bother to find out), and still more of France itself.

Don't read.

Okay. So the summary would be : someone kills someone else and Poirot finds out who, how and why.

The general opinion is that this isn't her best book, and I agree. An excess of red herrings and even more plot twists; more of a tiring and confusing narration than, a gripping one. Still it's good for a one time read.
Poirot notices people's characters, he finds out people's motives based on their characters. I find it annoying that it is not revealed to the readers, a description of their characters - not just plainly stating it, it could have been somehow made a part of a conversation.
Poirot just says “Haven't you noticed that so-and-so is a jealous person”
And Hastings says “oh really, I haven't noticed”.
Me neither, man.

The best thing about the book is that, it is one of a kind. You don't find many Indian gay men writing autobiographies. Much of my appreciation for this book I have to attribute to this fact; maybe a little more than I'd like.

Over 200 odd pages, Sharif describes his life's ups and downs - the numerous relationships he's had (not being judgmental, but that part is a little exhausting), the support and hostility of the people around him, his feelings and choices.

It is a brave attempt. Though of course, he's been brave way before he started writing a book.
He certainly bagged the first, but not the best, I hope. At times it felt like an essay, than a coherent life story. And times TMI?(considering the genre) I mean do you really want to know what Sufal said, looking down the author's pants?

Saying it was repetitive is probably offensive, ‘cause it's a guy's life, but it does get a little tiring in the later half. I wish his writing style was a little more engaging. LGBTQ literature in India is sparse, compared to the scene in the West. So I have only respect the pioneer.

“Many of us spent a larger part of our lives gathering courage to be oursleves”
- somebody the author knows.

I read this out of curiosity, ‘cause the LGBTQ scene in India is all hushed up. Pick it up if you are curious; along with loads of uninteresting info about the author's family, you'll get to know it from a person who has gone through it all.

I find it unfair, but certainly cannot hate when a book takes it to the next level, in the final chapter.

The Murder on the Orient Express is a locked room mystery. The best kind of whodunit. Nobody can complain if the clues in a mystery novel are too obscure or if the movements of the characters are deliberately confusing. But in this book chapters there are chapters dedicated to Poirot's ‘movement notes', list of clues and summary of whatever he' learnt.
I wish my textbooks wished so much as this book to really let me know what's going on. The ending is not really predictable. There are a few observations that H.P keeps to himself, that helps in keeping the final solution in the dark. There are leaps of theory that may not always make sense, but it does in the situation.
The book constantly keeps us thinking. I had a notebook with the movements and carriage position before I knew there were dedicated pages for them. There are foreseeable plot points. But it is a book, and for us this murder is in text. H.P can see, and we can't. And although a lot more eloquent than Sherlock, he doesn't always tell us what he sees.

I would not call this great literature. I don't want to be a snob, rating 5 only for great lit. The writing is ordinary. The plot is exceptional. This book had me hooked, kept me wondering till the end. The ending is beautiful. It's not just surprising. It's satisfying. Probably one of the most satisfying endings I've read.

Looking back on it, it's a whodunit with a heart.

A county prosecutor's complicated past is dug up, during a trial involving a loaded defendant.

Engaging writing as far as thrillers are concerned.
Humor✅️
Not too macho, lots of practical women ✅️
For some reason all women are hot. It felt a little unnecessary, to mention how his jaw dropped every time. Anyway feminine beauty is art for him. So, it's... fine. I guess.

You do see some of the twists coming earlier in the story, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable.

A good light read.

Boring read.