Alan

A preposterous story strung together with cliches and characters who are uniformly arrogant, angry, and sarcastic. I stopped listening when I realized that I wanted each of them to meet a bad end.

Too much science and too little character and plot development made this more work than pleasure. The narrator tried to make up for it with melodrama but overdid it.

That's Elmore Leonard's phrase. The best part of this work is the narration. He handles a long list of characters (Think War and Peace.) with differing voices, accents and emotions, all done extremely well. However, this is a book in serious need of an editor. That would cut it by at least a third. It's a murder mystery (in the style of Ellery Queen, the locked room type stuff). But the murder doesn't happen until 2 hours 40 minutes into the book. Most of what precedes it is unnecessary. It doesn't advance the story. There are brutally banal conversations among the characters about phonetics and the difference between fiction and melodrama. It doesn't stop after the murder. You know what the difference is between cigarettes and chocolates? No you don't. Cigarettes are sold homosexually. Chocolates are sold heterosexually. The rest of the waste material is the author spouting off his opinions on British literature and history. He's not without knowledge. But who cares? Are you reading a mystery to find out how an Elizabethan stage is constructed? This is a guy who would make you sprint out the door at a cocktail party.

When I say sophomoric, I mean high school, not college. The dialogue is stilted, artificial, and trite. Even the narrative is awful. Stuff like this: "Deep down I had a feeling I wasn't going to like what she had to say." And this: "I wanted to ravish her body." A murder trial is central to the plot. I tried cases for 30 years. The defendant is represented by a lazy incompetent passed off as something better. The prosecutor ignores, apparently intentionally, obvious evidence that should materially affect his investigation. If this author has ever been in courtroom, I hope it was only as a spectator.

A brilliant author. A superb narrator. What more can one ask? McKinty is as good a story teller as Nelson DeMille, at least as good with dialogue and characters as Robert Parker (bless his soul) was. His metaphors range from classical literature and mythology to popular culture. Listen a second time to to catch more of them. Doyle is a master. Multiple Irish, English, Scottish, American accents are no problem. Even a brief operatic solo in Italian is pleasant and leaves me wanting more.

The idea for the story is good. Technically, the writing is good. But so much of the book is one depressing scene after another that I cannot call the overall experience enjoyable. The characters are absolutely humorless. Virtually all the conversations and introspections are maudlin. Scott Brick is generally a fine narrator, but because of what he was saying I grew tired of his voice. In print I would have skipped large chunks of the book.

Fine writing with humor in the style of Tom Sharpe. Maybe not as good as he, but who is? There's a Shakespearean type finale when all the characters gather on stage to resolve questions and reveal surprises. There's even an ending soliloquy by Zen on the mysteries of life. My only criticism is that the main character is a bit more of a bumbler than I like in crime novels.

Adrian McKinty is the best writer of novels that I have come across in my 66 years. He is better at describing the plight of victims than Dickens; better at dialogue than Robert Parker; as funny as David Rosenfeldt; as good at plotting as Nelson DeMille. Maybe he doesn't have the oddball characters of Carl Hiassen, but who does? And Hiassen is like a rich dessert. McKinty will make you work for some of it. His allusions range from classic literature and mythology to hum drum television. I think this is as good as it gets.

The degree to which you enjoy this book will be in direct proportion to how conservative your political and religious views are. It may have been ghost written by Glenn Beck.

Written with all the charm, style, and wit of a firearms catalog. I'm a gun owner, but I'm not consumed by it. If you enjoy detailed descriptions of bullets moving through human bodies and heads augmented by colorful narratives of exploding tissue, this is your kind of literature.

Despite being predictable in parts, the book is a very good listen because of the interesting characters and the narrator who brings them alive. This guy could make the phone book sound like fun.