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A review by staylorbaptiste
Stray Bullets by Robert Rotenberg
3.0
Robert Rotenberg’s Stray Bullets is an entertaining, albeit mindless read. The story takes place in Toronto, Canada and involves the murder of a young boy outside a Tim Horton’s and the pursuit to find the truth in what happened. It was a quick and easy book, a good novel for anyone looking for some simple mystery.
The story starts with a shooting incident during the season’s first November snow fall and continues through the trial of the suspect. It was engaging and Rotenberg does an excellent job of keeping you reading, especially by ending his short but numerous chapters with cliff hangers.
Rotenberg’s book has been heralded as “doing for Toronto what Ian Rankin did for Edinburgh”, however, I disagree. Having read Rankin’s books, I enjoyed them a lot more than I did this one. Maybe I’m being biased due to the fact I’m Canadian, but I felt it was too “Canadian”. It seemed like Rotenberg repeatedly named commonly-known street names and intersections just for the sake of reinforcing his Toronto setting. The technique didn’t add anything particular to the plot, and didn’t allow me to picture the action any more clearly.
Stray Bullets is part of a series of books that revolve around Detective Ari Greene. Interestingly, each chapter is shown from a different characters point of view. Although not written in first person, each chapter was seen from the eyes of Detective Greene, or the Crown Attorney, or the defence attorney, etc. He also didn’t find a way to establish any sort of connection with the characters. They were just figures inside of a story. On top of that, Rotenberg has a funny habit of continuously reminding the reader of who characters are even though you’ve come across them numerous times already. It was somewhat repetitive and occasionally frustrating.
Overall, Stray Bullets was a good, quick read. It was exactly what I was looking for after finishing the marathon of a book that is A Storm of Swords in the Song of Ice and Fire series. Rotenberg kept my attention, not because it was a profoundly captivating book, but more so because I just wanted to know the outcome once I had started reading it. All that being said, it’s a fine summer novel to decompress on between books.
The story starts with a shooting incident during the season’s first November snow fall and continues through the trial of the suspect. It was engaging and Rotenberg does an excellent job of keeping you reading, especially by ending his short but numerous chapters with cliff hangers.
Rotenberg’s book has been heralded as “doing for Toronto what Ian Rankin did for Edinburgh”, however, I disagree. Having read Rankin’s books, I enjoyed them a lot more than I did this one. Maybe I’m being biased due to the fact I’m Canadian, but I felt it was too “Canadian”. It seemed like Rotenberg repeatedly named commonly-known street names and intersections just for the sake of reinforcing his Toronto setting. The technique didn’t add anything particular to the plot, and didn’t allow me to picture the action any more clearly.
Stray Bullets is part of a series of books that revolve around Detective Ari Greene. Interestingly, each chapter is shown from a different characters point of view. Although not written in first person, each chapter was seen from the eyes of Detective Greene, or the Crown Attorney, or the defence attorney, etc. He also didn’t find a way to establish any sort of connection with the characters. They were just figures inside of a story. On top of that, Rotenberg has a funny habit of continuously reminding the reader of who characters are even though you’ve come across them numerous times already. It was somewhat repetitive and occasionally frustrating.
Overall, Stray Bullets was a good, quick read. It was exactly what I was looking for after finishing the marathon of a book that is A Storm of Swords in the Song of Ice and Fire series. Rotenberg kept my attention, not because it was a profoundly captivating book, but more so because I just wanted to know the outcome once I had started reading it. All that being said, it’s a fine summer novel to decompress on between books.