A review by thesummer
The False Mirror by Charles Todd

2.0

The prose for this novel (and indeed, the whole series that I have read) is needlessly overdramatic, flowery, and cheesy. The author has a problem with writing women that are not clichés, as well as with telling, rather than showing. Passages where Inspector Rutledge meets a woman and immediately figures out what kind of person she is have really begun to grate on me--whether it's deciding right away that she has an incredible strength of character through the steel in her eyes, or that she is a harsh gossip who rules the town from her posture and expression, it's both silly and unrealistic. This novel suffers from bad pacing--it has way too much set-up and too many red herrings, and does not get interesting until the very end, with a decent enough twist. I understand, of course, the importance of set-up and that in real life, policemen follow many leads that turn out to be dead ends, but there was far too much of that in this book.
Although I found some of it quite engaging, and though I always liked the discussion of themes like PTSD, I think I'm done with this series. There has simply been one too many "Good God! Not ___, man, not ____!" for me to motivate myself to read any more.