The Blind Man of Seville by Robert Wilson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ups:
1. A healthy and intriguiging start.
2. A very evocative description of Seville and Tangiers.
3. Falcon Sr.’s journals.

Downs :
1. After 200 pages have gone by the speed starts to slow and slowwwww.
2. The investigation gets nowhere and the personal problems of the protagonist piles up.
3. The ending. After a boring and long drawn 400+ pages, this is the ending that the author wanted to reveal. Dissapointing to say the least.
4. Never knew someone wrote journals in direct speech approach.
5. The protagonist hardly creates any emotion in my mind except that he came out to be weak and whinning.
6. This book felt just like a P.D. James novel.
7. The book should have been names “The Co-Incidences of Seville”

Verdict : Why can’t these guys just write a nicely twisted and fast paced crime novel.



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A Beam of Light by Andrea Camilleri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Beam of Light by Andrea Camilleri is the latest in the Inspector Salvu Montalbano series penned by him, set in the fictional Italian town of Vigata. Like many of its predecessors this book also features a classic Andrea Camilleri format of having two crimes run parallel to each other. In this case there is a supposedly “Rape and Robbery”, a case of illegal arms trade, and a Mafia style murder. Also present is the somewhat peculiar relation between Montalbano and Livia, with an additional character in the form of a beautiful gallery owner called Marian.

Some authors fail to turn a book interesting with a pretty twisted plot in the tip of their pens, and whereas Andrea Camilleri with very simple and straightforward plots never fail to create a book which is not only fast and entertaining, but is emotional too. The humour quotient was missing and somehow this one was much more emotionally dark than any other Montalabano books I have read earlier. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it and would love to pick up the series in near future again.


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The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Girl In the Spider’s Web is the FOURTH instalment which most of us millennium fans had been waiting for. The book reached my hands quite early, but as I was stuck with a slow but steady historical mystery, I was not able to pick it up. Firstly, this book isn’t(I guess) the unfinished fourth book which Steig Larson had left when he was suddenly and sadly taken away from us. David Lagercrantz just took the characters and meshed them into a plot created by him, which was true to the themes of the original Larsson trilogy.

The first thing that I noticed while reading was that Mr. Lagercrantz never compromised with the speed. The first three books were lengthy, and though they never held a typical pure cat and mouse chase between the good and the bad, the books were never dull or slow. The fourth one was also the same. But, one sore thumb coming out of the book was the fact that the villains never felt complete. Their characterisation or their background somehow left me wanting for more. And the sad thing was that these guys were real interesting characters. Some detailing on them would have been much appreciated.

Other than this small glitch, the whole endeavour came out as smooth as silk. The violence made me sick, the pace made me giddy, Lisbeth’s prowess with the computer made me smile and to top it all Mr. Lagercrantz also made that one character appear in a big way, whose name always was mentioned in the previous books, but she always maintained to remain in the background. All in all this was a truly enjoyable read, and I hope this is not just one book affair, and we continue to get a series out of this.

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