Deception on His Mind
by Elizabeth George
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elizabeth GeorgeEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-10
ISBN: 0553575090
Number of pages: 752
Publisher: Bantam
Book Reviews of Deception on His Mind
Book Review: A Slow 750 Page Mega Novel and Then a Bad Ending, or Essentially No Ending, Yikes!!!
Summary: 3 Stars
This is my first Elizabeth George novel and it was a great disappointment. What was the author thinking? She is a good writer but the structure and length is simply awful here. I think she got caught up with her writing experience and lost sight of what makes a good novel. Somehow a simple police novel became longer than Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, 300 pages longer than Dostoevsky, believe it or not.
The novel opens strongly with a good hook: a murder on a beach on the English east coast. But, then that incident is followed by the long introduction of character after character, each with a detailed introduction. By page 100, the reader starts to think about terminating the read. By page 250 the plot has become clear and the motivation to read the whole 750 page novel has evaporated. Why read another 500 pages when we know who are the bad guys? After that I could not read each and every page. It was a mindless read that would take two or three days, and I skipped forward to page 600 or so where I picked up the story - without missing a heartbeat - and continued to read each and every word. It appeared that I had missed nothing of consequence in my jump over hundreds of pages. The novel ended inconclusively about 150 pages later and my hunch about the outcome was 75% correct. Overall, this was a bad reading experience.
There are many fundamental problems here. The two protagonists are two female police officers but they do not act like police officers. There seems to be no crime scene investigation, and for example, one of them walks around the hotel room of the victim picking up and examining objects at random. Was that room ever investigated properly? There are no police procedures in what is supposed to be a police story. So, that element lacks realism.
Secondly, the level of conversation is at a banal level, where the women use words such as "snigger" and other slang. They have a lot of mindless talk and not much action. Every 50 pages or so there is a sex related incident which I presume that is supposed to keep the reader interested.
There are lots of characters living in the seaside community in the UK, including a large group of Pakistani immigrants. The victim is a Pakistani male so a question is whether or not this is a hate crime. That is a main plot element here. The author handles this well, but again, these sections are far too long and inconclusive.
So, the problem is length, far too long. This is not War and Peace, it is a detective story: 750 pages! And, the primary character, Barbara, a police woman from Scotland Yard is not that sympathetic a character. George's famous Inspector Lynley plays no important role here.
This is a novel that should be 350 pages but somehow survived the edit and was published as a 750 page mega-novel. It is a novel to avoid: 3 stars.
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