Reviews - Cari Mora | The StoryGraph

Cari Mora by Thomas Harris, Jorma-Veikko Sappinen

345 reviews for:

When I got this ARC I said "WOW, Thomas Harris" and was prepared to read a terrifying, gritty and exciting book.
I had high expectations and unfortunately I was disappointed.
It's not a bad thriller but I found it a bit boring.
The villain si so over the top so I found him funny and not terrifying. Cari Mora is more interesting but it reminded me of a lot of other kick-ass heroine.
There were some moments when Mr Harris seems to remember how he wrote the Silence of the Lambs and you start hoping. It doesn't last and you go back to usual tran tran.
I have to admit that I like the crocodile but I was quite bored on the whole.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

pogie2's review against another edition

3.25

dark medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Loveable characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

nerdyboy's review against another edition

3.0

dark medium-paced

mansireanna's review against another edition

2.0

Overall, this was disappointing. It's the first Harris book I've actually read, and it didn't live up to anything I thought it would. I liked some of the characters, particularly the titular Cari, but thought there were far too many storylines and characters to make it a streamlined tale. Hans-Peter was a rip off Hannibal Lecter but with none of the charisma, and this just made him uninteresting - I didn't care at all about him so didn't care when he slipped out of the book for a while and honestly thought he was mostly irrelevant. The actual plot of getting the gold from under Pablo Escobar's house was intriguing, but the heist quickly became boring - how interesting can you make it when it was just working mechanics on a huge metal cube. The biggest redeeming quality of this book was Cari Mora herself - I really enjoyed her and her backstory, and seeing her be ruthless and yet kind was refreshing. She alone brought the book to 2 stars!

toddjohnson1187's review

1.0

Nothing worse than seeing an author who has written some fantastic books be stuck with this whopping dud. I only finished it because it was short and out of some misplaced hope that Harris would regain some of the magic of his early thrillers. I was wrong. There was no plot to speak of. It was just a series of things happening to characters I couldn't care less about. The only character with any definition at all was Cari Mora, and she was two-dimensional at best.

There might have been a good book in here, but it felt edited to within an inch of its life and felt like it needed another hundred or so pages to fill in the blanks. It felt like Harris took his outline and decided to publish that instead. This wasn't a novel, but rather the bones to create a novel.

Don't waste your time with this piece of crap. If you want to read Harris, go back to Red Dragon or Silence of the Lambs.

lydiahephzibah's review against another edition

DNF. I thought this would be a relatively easy read thanks to big font and short chapters but it's a slog; I literally don't understand the writing style or what's going on. Wish I'd read reviews before I picked it up, and I won't be continuing.

wagstaff's review against another edition

2.0

Divorced from whatever preconceived expectations you have for a Thomas Harris thriller, Cari Mora is still a letdown. It feels unfinished as a character study and heist story, sometimes unclear in the action and saturated in far too many characters to juggle given how thin this book is.