A Season for the Dead

I finished A Season for the Dead by David Hewson a few days ago. I've been chewing over what to say about this book. Pressure mounts because both David and I have read it. This is almost unheard of.

In the interest of complete disclosure I need to make it clear that if I really don't like a book, I do not finish reading it. I have heard lots of readers tossing around page number counts for how long they give an author to get going. My count varies quite a lot. But I wouldn't spend time talking about any book I really didn't like and didn't finish. So anything I read to the end I like in some aspect. It's a matter of degree with me. So I'm not going to ever dump all over a book. I just don't read it.

I measure crime fiction by how fast I read it. Was I so enamoured with it that it kept me from doing what I should have been doing? Did I stay up to finish it? Did I talk about it incessantly?Did I tell everybody in the world they should read it too? And on that note if you haven't read Louise Penny, you should.

This book fails in the compelling read category. I didn't read it every single chance I got. I messed around with the iphone between chapters. In general, I was not engrossed. That doesn't mean I didn't want to know how it ended. It just didn't matter to me how long it took me to find out.

But, and this is what makes a book for me, I really liked Nic Costa. He deserved better treatment from the people around him, but he was likeable. He understood what was going on. The balance of naive, yet intelligent worked for me. I didn't yell at him for being stupid. I was never irritated at him. He acted on the information he was given. Not his fault that he didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle.

Less than halfway through the book, the police figure out who they are looking for. The tension created by that was one of the book's strong points. Most of the time, mysteries are built around figuring out who this looney might be. Here they know, but can't find him anyway. Nice bit of business.

I figured out the central mystery concerning Sara Farnese. It was her name that made me start thinking that facts about her were not actually facts. Come on. Farnese. Even I knew enough about Rome to think that couldn't be her name. And Rome is not anything like an area of expertise for me. In fairness, I figure many things like that out. The first Ruth Rendell book. Soylent green is people. I almost never take anything at face value. I think that says more about me than how the book was constructed. I don't hold it against any author if I am not surprised or shocked. I'd never read anything if I had to be surprised.

I wasn't sure where the ending would head, but I thought it left a lot of wiggle room for further books, while at the same time satisfying the plot at hand. That is no mean accomplishment, and Hewson deserves applause for it. Since the killer had been identified, how his "capture" came about was the ending. Very good ending. It tied everything up for me, while leaving a few things open for future books.

I probably will read more in this series. But I won't feel bad just getting the books out of the library.

I probably will read more in this series, justnot right away.