This book was not for me. Unfortunately I did not finish it. I felt there were too many words used to say so little. It didn't capture my interest

Well i started to read and i don't even think i got 20% in and i had to just stop, I was confused on what was really going on that i did not want to continue with fear that i would be confused and annoyed all the way through.

Thanks NetGalley but this was not the book for me.

Let me start by saying I hate writing negative reviews as I feel the author really took time and thought and dedication to write this. I personally did not love this book. I did complete it as hard as it was at times. There were some good parts to this but there was a lot of unnecessary content and rambling on about things far to long which lost me as well as making it hard to hold my interest. I found myself thoroughly confused several times throughout this. The twist with the murders was good but unfortunately it was about 75% through before it started to get interesting. Don't let my review be your deciding factor as maybe this just wasn't for me.

Two murders occur at the same time ... midnight ... during a rainstorm. During the investigation, the lead detective finds al kinds of suspects, with multiple motives. Seemingly there is no connection between the victims and any of the suspects.

I seldom come across a book that I genuinely dislike. Unfortunately this is one. The narration at the beginning is long and boring and doesn't really have anything to do with the story at hand. Descriptions ran on and on and on ... I didn't particularly how long the road was or how green was the grass, etc.

I am thankful it's a short book, less than 200 pages, and I skimmed through a lot of it. Nothing here caught my attention. I have read other books by this author and enjoyed them.

Many thanks to the author / Troubador Publishing Limited / Netgalley. Opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own.

Wow, this was deep. The story starts out like a regular whodunit but quickly gets way deep. There are lots of sections of theory, philosophy and discussions on all sorts of topics: love, lying, deception, perception and perspective.
Two people are dead, who are they and what happened, who killed them and why? The cops are trying to figure it out, the witness could be best described as odd and therefore suspicious.
The procedural aspect of the book holds together the string of discussions and discourses through the book. It can be tough sometimes to get the to the story among all these tangents. There are a few topics that are really interesting, the discussion about lying, for instance.
Otherwise I slogged through it, just to see who did it. I didn't see the bad guy until closer to the big reveal, so not sure if I was clever or the the clues were there.
The crime story is incidental, and once I read about the background of the author, the other stuff made more sense to me.
If you are looking for a fast read, this is not it.

1 star

This book is narrated by a seventy-something writer and murder aficionado. He seems to revel in the murder of innocent people admiring and wondering at the “cleverness” of the killers.

To compare this book to The Name of the Rose is a major mistake. I enjoyed The Name of the Rose, this book, meh… Intellectual thriller? No. more like a self-aggrandizing diatribe of pure drivel. I couldn’t get through the “author’s” feast of self-importance in the first chapter.

I’ve read Michael Palmer’s other works, and they were great.

I want to thank NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer (the reason I selected this book), for forwarding to me a copy of this novel to read.

This was not the book for me. If you like long, detailed descriptions of the setting, like how the windows looked, or the exact shade of people's clothing, then perhaps you may like this. I understand more detail in a mystery is good, to help you solve the crime, but this is sensory overload to me. Even a bar's restrooms are described and how they could be improved. The plot is decent for a murder mystery, but it was ruined for me by hearing about every detail of the world on the way to getting to the plot.
The story covers a fictional author writing his magnum opus, which is a book on murderers, specifically focused on the murders in Newtown, where he lived and knew the guilty party.
I despise the fictional author. The foreword was the hardest part to get through, as the narrator describes murderers in loving detail, while briefly covering that the end of his 18 year marriage was great because it gave him more time to write about murderers. And he is lucky to have seen a murderer in real life, and what they ate, and how they lived, as this gives him credibility over other murder writers, makes others jealous of him. The afterword was a little better.
This was a well written book, and it tries to raise interesting questions, and include different ideas. It was just not for me, mostly because of the overly detailed, and sometimes wandering narration. It is somewhat non-linear and frequently jumps from the plot to a detailed description of a back story, what books a character reads, etc before returning to the plot. If you don't mind this, then you may enjoy this book.