I’ve been wanting to read one of Peter Swanson’s books for a long time, as I’ve heard so many good things about his previous books. In fact, I actually have most of Swanson’s previous books sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for me to read. I probably should’ve started at the beginning with his first book, but instead, I started backwards with his newest work Eight Perfect Murders, which came out this month. While I liked this one well enough overall, it didn’t impress me the way I was expecting it to.
The premise itself actually had a lot of potential: we have the main protagonist, bookstore owner
Malcolm (Mal) Kershaw, who writes a blog post for his store book that lists 8
books where he felt had “perfect” murders – ones that were nearly impossible to
crack and almost unsolvable. Years
later, after a surprise visit from an FBI agent, Mal discovers that someone has
been using his list to commit murders that were in the same vein as the ones
described in the books. Things get even
more complicated when Mal begins digging into the details of some of the cases
and realizes that the murders correlating with the books weren’t a mere coincidence
– there is a connection between all the murders, one that threatens to
implicate Mal himself.
As a reader, I definitely appreciated how the premise revolved
around books and was fascinated by how well Swanson was able to correlate those
books to the plot in his own story. With
that said though, I think I would’ve enjoyed this book more if I were an actual
fan of mysteries and thrillers, as this one seemed to be specifically tailored
to fans. While I do read a fair share of
books in the mystery / thriller / suspense category, I would only count myself
as a “casual” reader of the genre – I haven’t read any of the books mentioned
in the story (not even the Agatha Christie ones) and quite a few of them I
actually never even heard of.
In terms of the plot – I felt that some of the plot points were a
bit far-fetched and there were also too many “I knew I shouldn’t have but I did
it anyway” moments with Mal that annoyed me to no end (it’s actually one of my
pet peeves when it comes to characters in books). The other issue was that there was way too
much talking and explaining throughout the book, some of which I felt was
unnecessary and made some parts feel repetitious and long-winded. It also didn’t help that I felt zero
connection to any of the characters and at near the end, didn’t really care too
much what happened to them.
Overall, I felt this was a decent read that kept my attention, but
didn’t stand out. This one also didn’t
have as much of the suspense element that I was expecting – there were some
twists, but a lot of them were predictable and it kind of took the fun out of
reading this at times. I liked the
premise, but wasn’t a fan of the execution, mostly as it pertained to the plot
and how things played out. Having said
all that though, I’m still interested in reading Swanson’s other books, especially
his earlier ones, and of course, his next one.
Received ARC from William Morrow (HarperCollins) via NetGalley.
No comments:
Post a Comment