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han_cat 's review for:
The Blackhouse
by Peter May
This book didn’t get off to the best start with me, so would have needed to do a lot to win me over – and it didn’t seem to even try! Why was I annoyed? Far too cliché (both in books and TV/Film) to have a Police Detective with a recent family tragedy sent on a difficult case by an unsupportive boss. Don’t even get me started on the myriad of other clichéd characters and plot devices.
Secondly it doesn’t really feel like a crime/murder book, sure you can just about label it as a thriller but only just. The reader can assume from the beginning that all the delving back into Fin’s past will eventually make sense at the end, but all the same I dislike that over 90% off this book is about Fin’s childhood and not about the murder case directly. There feels to be a massive separation - where it could be two books stuck together with one or two connecting sentences. It basically comes across as wanting to write a book about Fin but also wanting to use the idea of a police detective investigating a murder and how at the last minute to combine it into one book. Actually what investigation of a murder?! At the end of the book everyone seems to have stopped bothering about the dead person. Wasn't that the point of the book ... no obviously not(!).
Thirdly I do not like the character of Fin at all, it is beyond believable all the bad things that have happened in his past so I found it impossible to connect with him at all. These nasty past events do not excuse or even explain Fin's personality - I can only see him as a nasty apathetic boy/young man – and nothing in the writing gives him any redeemable qualities.
I also dislike the affronting gore at the beginning of the book relating to the post mortem. It is frankly unnecessary to be that graphic [rarely to this degree by other, much better, writers] and is a complete contradiction to the slowness and vagueness of the remainder of the book.
Finally the ending is beyond rubbish, an amalgamation of a million and one bad-to-average film plots. Leaves me questioning if the author even wants their reader to enjoy the book, or they just wrote if for their own gratification.
Sorry to rant so but I really wanted to like this book, because of its setting and having read some good regional detective books recently but to me this book was dreadful. I will not be reading any more of the series.
Secondly it doesn’t really feel like a crime/murder book, sure you can just about label it as a thriller but only just. The reader can assume from the beginning that all the delving back into Fin’s past will eventually make sense at the end, but all the same I dislike that over 90% off this book is about Fin’s childhood and not about the murder case directly. There feels to be a massive separation - where it could be two books stuck together with one or two connecting sentences. It basically comes across as wanting to write a book about Fin but also wanting to use the idea of a police detective investigating a murder and how at the last minute to combine it into one book. Actually what investigation of a murder?! At the end of the book everyone seems to have stopped bothering about the dead person. Wasn't that the point of the book ... no obviously not(!).
Thirdly I do not like the character of Fin at all, it is beyond believable all the bad things that have happened in his past so I found it impossible to connect with him at all. These nasty past events do not excuse or even explain Fin's personality - I can only see him as a nasty apathetic boy/young man – and nothing in the writing gives him any redeemable qualities.
I also dislike the affronting gore at the beginning of the book relating to the post mortem. It is frankly unnecessary to be that graphic [rarely to this degree by other, much better, writers] and is a complete contradiction to the slowness and vagueness of the remainder of the book.
Finally the ending is beyond rubbish, an amalgamation of a million and one bad-to-average film plots. Leaves me questioning if the author even wants their reader to enjoy the book, or they just wrote if for their own gratification.
Sorry to rant so but I really wanted to like this book, because of its setting and having read some good regional detective books recently but to me this book was dreadful. I will not be reading any more of the series.