Take a photo of a barcode or cover
kindleandilluminate 's review for:
A Beautiful Blue Death
by Charles Finch
What a disappointment, from beginning to end.
I only finished (painstakingly dragging myself to the last page) because it's a mystery, and it's hard to give a full judgment of a whodunnit without the solution. I needn't have bothered - the solution was as bland and illogical as the rest of the plot. Historical errors and jarringly anachronistic language were rife throughout the novel, the mystery plodded along without a decent clue or interesting twist for chapter after endless chapter until Lenox - practically a parody of a Phineas Fogg archetype, without every single thing that makes Verne's character interesting - finally leaps to some conclusions and the culprit shows up at his doorstep to confess. Convenient. There are also several weird, irritating stylistic flaws - like brief, abrupt switches from Lenox's perspective to sudden omniscience, or one single, late-in-the-game authorial voice intrusion, or the time jump near the end explaining what happens for the next few decades of one character's life...before sliding back to the regular time line for another couple of utterly unnecessary chapters. An example of one of these flaws -- when Lenox visits Skaggs, Mrs. Skaggs says she has never met the gentleman detective before, though she's seen him through his carriage window. A page later, as Lenox is leaving, she says it's always a pleasure to welcome him to her home. Which is it, Completely Unnecessary Character? There's so much padding - largely in the form of "and then they had tea and they had toast and it was nice and the fire was warm so Lenox felt warm and then he had a nap and then he woke up and had some coffee" - I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the author was paid by the word.
A Beautiful Blue Death completely fails as a mystery, as a work of historical fiction, and as anything like an interesting or engaging novel. It boggles the mind how there are several more in the series, but needless to say, I won't be reading any of them.
I only finished (painstakingly dragging myself to the last page) because it's a mystery, and it's hard to give a full judgment of a whodunnit without the solution. I needn't have bothered - the solution was as bland and illogical as the rest of the plot. Historical errors and jarringly anachronistic language were rife throughout the novel, the mystery plodded along without a decent clue or interesting twist for chapter after endless chapter until Lenox - practically a parody of a Phineas Fogg archetype, without every single thing that makes Verne's character interesting - finally leaps to some conclusions and the culprit shows up at his doorstep to confess. Convenient. There are also several weird, irritating stylistic flaws - like brief, abrupt switches from Lenox's perspective to sudden omniscience, or one single, late-in-the-game authorial voice intrusion, or the time jump near the end explaining what happens for the next few decades of one character's life...before sliding back to the regular time line for another couple of utterly unnecessary chapters. An example of one of these flaws -- when Lenox visits Skaggs, Mrs. Skaggs says she has never met the gentleman detective before, though she's seen him through his carriage window. A page later, as Lenox is leaving, she says it's always a pleasure to welcome him to her home. Which is it, Completely Unnecessary Character? There's so much padding - largely in the form of "and then they had tea and they had toast and it was nice and the fire was warm so Lenox felt warm and then he had a nap and then he woke up and had some coffee" - I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the author was paid by the word.
A Beautiful Blue Death completely fails as a mystery, as a work of historical fiction, and as anything like an interesting or engaging novel. It boggles the mind how there are several more in the series, but needless to say, I won't be reading any of them.