Devils' Corner

By Lisa Scottoline
I’m afraid I found this book quite dull. Really dull, in fact. So dull it gets my annual award for Crime Novel Least Likely to Inspire Me to Stay Up Past My Bedtime as well as my other annual award for Least Plausible and Least Interesting Love Story.

So why was this book so dull? It wasn’t badly written. It had a relatively good plot – at least, it wasn’t one of those ones about some shifty white-collar crime involving convoluted financial arrangements, which I always find particularly challenging to follow…no, I think it was because the characters weren’t terribly engaging. They got a bit better by the end of the book, but I didn’t really get a sense of our heroine ever being particularly interesting. Her love interest was silly, as I believe I have already inferred. Also, she had a very annoying way of interviewing suspects and witnesses and so on, which seemed to be essentially to bombard them with a long series of questions and not let them have any time to respond. No subtle Inspector Goran-type methods here!

Anyway, what happens? Our heroine, Vicki Allegretti, goes to meet a confidential informant about some gun-running but interrupts the murder of said confidential informant, and the theft of some very good quality cocaine. Also, her partner gets killed. So naturally she has to investigate, against the express wishes of her boss, of course. (I think Lisa Scottoline needs to read a bit of Jasper Fforde, to make her more aware of crime novel cliches). Ho-hum.

Rating: 4 out of 10