Friday, March 21, 2014

Brotherhood of Fear / Paul Grossman 312 p.

If you're going to take the trouble to write a mystery novel, develop an interesting, believable main character (Inspector Willi Kraus of the Berlin police, a refugee from the Nazis in a vividly-imagined 1930s Paris) and craft a complex, cynical plot that's well-paced and engaging, then the least you could do before publishing it is proofread it. Otherwise, you might annoy the stink out of your reader. She might scream aloud when she's forced to read 'evidentally' not once, but twice. When you write 'repel' when you mean 'rappel' she might toss the book to the floor and crack the spine. Apalling, domicle, financeer, and unimanigable will have her swearing to get her money back from the publisher (St Martin's), except that it was checked out for free from the library.

And the French! Mon dieu! Being unable to write in French is no crime, but as Dirty Harry once said, "a man's gotta know his limitations." Why pepper the text with French when you obviously dropped it in the second semester of college? I'd wager you could walk into any Starbuck's in Manhattan and find someone both qualified to edit those portions of the text and unemployed, too.
As much as I enjoyed Willi, to future volumes in this series I will have to say 'non.'

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