A review by yorugua1891
The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block

3.0

This is my first try reading a novel by Lawrence Block and I came away with mixed feelings. On one hand, I liked the main character, Matt Scudder, because he is a PI with a conflicted past, who mixes dark moments with humorous commentary and who is not afraid to get a little dirty to get the job done. On the other hand, the story was uneven in its quality. It started out very promising, when the father of a young woman who was brutally murdered asked Scudder to look into the events that transpired, even though the killer had committed suicide in prison shortly after been caught. But after that, if felt like a subpar concert. In the second movement of a concert is where most of the time my interest is lost when the quality is not great, the reason is that in these cases it just fills like the composer was filling up space to follow form and get to the final and third movement.

I felt similarly about this book. In the middle the story completely lost its appeal, became a drag and I thought it was going to be a painful experience until the finish. Luckily for me, this proved to be untrue, and towards the end, the pace picked up, the story became engaging again, and I was left with the sense that the series may be promising after all.

The bottom line for me is that i will probably end up reading the second book of this series in the near future. My hope is that the dark stories with graphic scenes and explicit language will remain, together with the finely crafted humor and the interesting main character, while at the same time keeping the appeal of the plot high throughout the book.