“What’s funny about this book is that when I picked it up from the library, it had a little blue sticker with a magnifying glass on the spine, the kind for Mysteries.
I read the description and was sort of familiar with the book, and I really didn’t think there was much mystery to it. Not the kind of mystery that magnifying glasses help with, anyway.
How did that whole magnifying glass thing get started? Was there one farsighted detective who made it a thing? When I was a kid, I was always dying for a mystery to happen so I could break out the rectangular magnifying glass that was stashed in a tiny drawer attached to our two volume dictionary.
Why were criminals in mysteries always walking through paint or tar and leaving footprints? How easy would it be to just SAY that fingerprints matched in 1850? Who is going to disagree?
My point here is that I’m not very sharp when it comes to mysteries. So not sharp, in fact, that I don’t think I appreciated this book as a mystery until finishing it last night.
There are so many elements that are wonderfully wrapped up in the last pages of this book. You get so comfortable with everything, the dead girl game, the telltale heart, the animal behavior. You get so comfortable with everything that the effect when it’s twisted up at the end is really powerful. Because it’s well done and also (again, I suck at mystery, so it could be just me) because you’re tricked into thinking these small elements, these running gags if you will, are not as important as they become.
It’s reading a mystery that you didn’t know was a mystery. Where a lot hinges on the ending, although you don’t know that until you get there. It’s an impressive writing feat, really. “