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A review by usbsticky
Hope to Die by Lawrence Block
4.0
Spoilers ahead:
Well, that was something slightly different and I'm glad that Block does more than most authors' boiler plate plots in their series. In this book a respectable couple is killed in a home invasion burglary and the wife brutally raped. The killers are shortly found in a murder suicide scenario where one of them kills the other and then commits suicide. The evidence is all there including fingerprint and stolen goods. Case closed, right?
Well apparently the police closes the case but the niece of the wife contacts Scudder and tells him that she doesn't feel right about the case. There is one key element she insists is fishy. The house has an alarm and the killers would not have been able to bypass it.
It's got Scudder intrigued and he starts his usual bulldog like investigation. He starts off with who benefits (daughter inherits a lot of money, $10M worth) and looks at everything. He starts finding anomalies and the case starts to unravel.
What's different in this book is that Block includes the killer's POV. I actually hate this because I don't like having to reset my mind when the killer's POV alternates with the rest of the narrative. And it's mostly a waste of time since you don't really know who he is anyway, until the end. I'd rather just stick with Scudder's POV.
Apart from that, it's good investigative crime protocol which Block excels at. The other good thing is there isn't a lot of that long stretched dialog between characters that don't really lead anywhere. Maybe there is, I usually now automatically fast read through it if it's not interesting, though sometimes it is. And I pretty much fast read through the killer's POV (not losing anything) and managed to finish the book in one day.
Well, that was something slightly different and I'm glad that Block does more than most authors' boiler plate plots in their series. In this book a respectable couple is killed in a home invasion burglary and the wife brutally raped. The killers are shortly found in a murder suicide scenario where one of them kills the other and then commits suicide. The evidence is all there including fingerprint and stolen goods. Case closed, right?
Well apparently the police closes the case but the niece of the wife contacts Scudder and tells him that she doesn't feel right about the case. There is one key element she insists is fishy. The house has an alarm and the killers would not have been able to bypass it.
It's got Scudder intrigued and he starts his usual bulldog like investigation. He starts off with who benefits (daughter inherits a lot of money, $10M worth) and looks at everything. He starts finding anomalies and the case starts to unravel.
What's different in this book is that Block includes the killer's POV. I actually hate this because I don't like having to reset my mind when the killer's POV alternates with the rest of the narrative. And it's mostly a waste of time since you don't really know who he is anyway, until the end. I'd rather just stick with Scudder's POV.
Apart from that, it's good investigative crime protocol which Block excels at. The other good thing is there isn't a lot of that long stretched dialog between characters that don't really lead anywhere. Maybe there is, I usually now automatically fast read through it if it's not interesting, though sometimes it is. And I pretty much fast read through the killer's POV (not losing anything) and managed to finish the book in one day.