Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First of all, this novel should come with a red tape screaming “ Spoiler Alert!”. I would expect from a devoted mystery reader to not ignore the one glaring rule: don’t spoil the ending for other readers. But this novel does. It violates the rule in a careless way without any hint of apology. 8 good plots are spoiled in the first few chapters of the novel, in addition to others throughout the book. But you know what? I was willing to go with it because it is Peter Swanson. The master who gave us The Kind Worth Killing, Her Every Fear and Before She Knew Him. The problem with this book is that it doesn’t resemble the work we come to expect from Swanson. At all. The writing is stale. The plot lines are disintegrated. You don’t enjoy the stoicism of the main character as you do with his previous novels. The main character actually TALKS about his stoicism repeatedly. Too much repetition. Too much shallow details that lead to nowhere. No surprises. Just some shadows of Swanson’s signature style here and there. Disappointed beyond words. I only hope that he needed to get this fascination with those novels out of his system, I read Strangers on a Train based on his recommendation in a previous interview, so maybe this half- baked idea was nagging him to get it in a novel and now it’s done, and we can move forward. Still, the fact that this book appears to be the first in a series is seriously worrying. I hated, hated, the blandness of Malcolm Kershaw.