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I finished it this morning in the waiting room of the outpatients clinic and the truth is that it would’ve been better for me to take a nap. The pity is that I couldn’t ‘forget’ it there, because I had it on my Kindle.
The first thing: the translation is so horrible that I almost stopped reading it because of it. Then, the descriptions of the misery and the neighborhoods of London are so extensive, in relation to the length of the book, that you could do without most of them. The plot is nothing original. I don’t know what to say about the investigation. The ending is the typical meeting where all the suspects are present, as well as all the investigators, in this case the coroner John Cranston and Friar Athelstan, and they reveal the murderer by explaining the case from the beginning.
The catch here is that it’s not known how they reach the final conclusions. In many novels all the clues are given so that the reader can discover the murderer for themselves; in Ellery Queen’s, even, the challenge is explicit, there’s a page where they tell you that you already have all the clues and with that you can reach the end. Here, clues are few and unclear, so you can imagine anything as the ending.
Well, I’ve written more than this little novel deserves, and I say ‘little’ because it’s short. The author, Paul Harding, P. C. Doherty’s pseudonym, writes them like hot cakes, and I have a load of them to read. I’m not going to get rid of them because they don’t take up space, but I don’t think I’ll read them unless I’m in a hurry because I don’t have anything else to occupy my brain.