Восемь идеальных убийств

This book has been vastly overrated.

I marked it two stars because it wasn't the worst book I've ever read, but it wasn't worth reading for true mystery and suspense fans.

1) Reading the books on the list was a much better experience than reading the book.

Eight Perfect Murders spoils so many classic mysteries that you should read INSTEAD of this book. I knew about the spoilers beforehand and made sure I read all the mysteries listed on the description. Luckily, I had already read some of them, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is not on the list but completely spoiled. They are all better than this book.

2) The narrator, and maybe the author, are not the classic mystery lovers they make themselves out to be.

I already mentioned all the spoilers, which I was prepared for. What really irked me was how the spoilers were not 100% accurate about the books they were describing.

Sure they are small discrepancies... he describes a murder scene as a pond instead of a huge lake, how two murders take place in one of the novels instead of three, that there's a secret passage in one of the novels that leads from the study instead of the library. But having just read many of these books, which the author framed his entire story around, it made me question how carefully the author had read them.

Not to mention the narrator is extremely jaded about the genre. He doesn't like mystery and suspense anymore, so he's kind of a wet blanket when you are reading one...

3) The narrator and the plot line are BORING.

While the earlier offenses I could possibly forgive, the pacing felt all wrong. The narrator reveals himself to be unreliable early on and turns out to be the most boring unreliable narrator I have ever read.

Not much actually happens besides the narrator walking around in the snowy streets and worrying. When “the truth” finally comes out, it is no surprise— especially to lovers of the genre.

It felt like the author was clinging to the twist (if you can call it that) to make it interesting. You know, instead of character and plot development. So the whole thing was decidedly uninteresting for a book about murder.

More problems:

Characters are introduced and fall out of the story. (Uh, Gwen, where did you go?)

The organization that inherently comes with a LIST of eight murders for a serial killer to commit somehow disappears. (Seriously, at the end you can't even remember how many were checked off the list).

And, worst of all, you do not care about anyone in the story. (Except maybe the pets, who really don't seem to care when their owners get murdered.)

Forget this one and just read the classics instead.