Title: A bit of a drag
Product review: If you are looking for an exciting, relaxing mystery novel, you should skip this one. Lehane shows the grief and suffering caused by murder, but there is little payoff. For much of the novel, you are manipulated into thinking a particular character has committed the murder, but the narrator is rather overtly playing games with you, setting you up, in a way that feels intrusive. At the same time, you spend more of your time feeling depressed along with the victim's family members than you do following the process of discovering whodunit. The characters are carefully drawn, but the only insight this book tries to offer is that sometimes a person commits murder because they've been made to suffer themselves. After putting up with Lehane's lugubrious style and long passages that urge you to feel depressed, this is not enough to justify the pain. Not a very fun read.
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