My Wife and I Could’ve Read Something More Interesting

Read this as part of CBR10Bingo: Two heads are better than one. Reviewing this one with my wife.

I didn’t know until after I finished this that the book itself was a re-written teleplay from the show. Had I known that, I probably would have held off on reading it for awhile because you can see the proverbial glue and scotch tape that held this together and it’s not pretty.

I appreciated the female detective navigating layers of patriarchy to try and solve the case. I thought that was done well (and I look forward to seeing it done well on screen some day by the great Helen Mirren) but the plotting is clunky and the mood never really settles. The mystery is interesting enough but the whole time, I was kind of wondering what this would look like on the big screen. Now I know why I felt that way. Not bad but not what I expected.

As for my wife’s take on it…

It read like a British mini-series. Short, direct. It was an easy read but not necessarily an entertaining one. There were entirely too many police officer characters to keep track of. The case itself was somewhat interesting. I’m not sure what was gained by teasing out the murderer the way the book did. What disappointed me most is that it read a little too much like a procedural and for a book, I would have preferred something more exciting. And I found the relational descriptions almost wasteful. I saw no need for the boyfriend character or any intimate descriptions of the detective’s family life.