I’m really not sure what to make of this novel. The storyline was complex but it just ended up seeming far too confusing and making me struggle to get through it. One of the biggest problems I found with the novel was the timeline. Everything that happens in the novel supposedly happens over a very short space of time (I would guess around 24 hours) but at times this seemed almost impossible to grasp because so much was going on that when you realised that only maybe an hour or two had passed you couldn’t help but wonder how much had been done in that time. At times I found this to be quite jarring because I had believed myself to be days ahead of the previous acting and yet when we returned to Mialkovsky it turned out to have only be a little bit of time.
I think one of the things I also found a little boring was the fact there was no real mystery. Yes the CSIs had to work out the killer and how everything ‘went down’ but the reader already knew. That said the initial crime scene was rather complicated to work out and I found myself getting muddled between the UCs and all the different cars which seemed to go around.
I don’t think Ken Goddard had the same understanding of the characters which Max Allan Collins showed in the previous CSI novels. The characters just didn’t seem to flow as well as they had done in the previous books. Some of the dialogue didn’t really seem to ring true to the characters.
The science in the book is also a little over the top. As much as I like CSI I don’t tend to view it as a lesson in forensic science and field investigations – this novel however seemed to want to give me that. There was far too much technical jargon which ultimately brought me out of the storyline and left me feeling rather confused and disorientated. I can understand the author (previously a CSI himself) wanting to give a realistic portrayal of the career but it just didn’t seem to work. The tests, processes and analysis are covered thoroughly and in detail (so much detail on the placing of stickers before being photographed left me feeling more than a little bored).
But for all the slogging through the novel there was not even a worthwhile conclusion. Yes I understand that in real life CSI cases there will not always be a satisfactory end to a case but this isn’t the real world. It is almost as if this was supposed to be a two parter – although I am not entirely sure I could face another book like this.
What could have been a very interesting story very sadly wasn’t.
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