Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.
Only a few chapters remain. Last time, Kirk had himself a serious battle in the desert, but in his shape, he’s still going to need help.
So have I been calling our killer this whole time? I don’t know. I haven’t read the chapter yet, at least not since I originally bought the book. That’s the trouble with mystery stories. Once you’ve read it, you already know whodunit, and that is lost. What a good mystery story has to do is give you a reason to come back if you didn’t forget the killer. That’s harder with something that gets famous, like the classic Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple series. People talk about those books, but notice how few spoilers there are from Sherlock Holmes stories unless you see the adaptations. Admittedly this may not be the case in actual mystery fan circles, but unless Professor Moriarty shows up, and in adaptations you’d think Moriarty ALWAYS shows up even when he didn’t in the novels, I couldn’t tell you any of the criminals. Moriarty overshadows and becomes the cultural meme and awareness.
So what brings you back is seeing the character interactions, how they go about solving the case, and maybe spotting clues you didn’t your first readthrough. This story has been heavy on the character interactions, but at the expense of the murder mystery. When it does remember the mystery, it’s all procedural. You learn the clues along with Kirk but because you have the same time away from the case as Kirk you don’t really get to try to solve anything. I only spotted a few clues because I went back to check on information for the review of a later chapter. Decide for yourself if that hurts the story, but it’s time to dive back into it.
