Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
unusual setting and character... warm and funny..., August 7, 2005
Just picked this up and enjoyed it thoroughly! Unusual setting is a linguistics facility doubling as day care center. (They study the evolution of language in toddlers.) One of the linguists is run over at night and the mystery begins. It's intelligent, humorous, and human as our hero, Jeremy Cook, stumbles along being head smart, heart dumb, dealing with a quirky police lieutenant, a beautiful young graduate student, a napoleonic department head, and fellow academic linguists who like him more than he realizes. The plot twist is unusual but what really makes the book endearing is being inside Jeremy's head and hearing human concerns expressed through bookish terms in a warm and funny way. I've ordered the next two already.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Carkeet's first book and only mystery, December 13, 2006
The first title of a trilogy featuring the central character, Jeremy Cook, a linguist who in this mystery is employed in a research lab/day-care center where the scientists study the development of language in children. When one of the researchers is discovered dead in Cook's office he becomes the prime suspect. Eventually, however, the answer comes from the mouths of babes. This was Carkeet's first book, and his only straightforward mystery. Its quirky-but-likeable characters are well-suited to the form, but the two succeeding volumes ("The Full Catastrophe," 1990, and "The Error of Our Ways," 1997) were set in more conventional, albeit bizarre, situations. All three are concerned with the effect of speech (or lack of it) in interpersonal relationships. Carkeet is also the author of "The Greatest Slump of All Time," (1984), a superb novel about baseball players; "I Been There Before, (1985), about the resurrection of Mark Twain; "The Silent Treatment," (1988), a novel for young adults; and "Campus Sexpot," (2005), a memoir of his high-school days in Sonora, CA in the early 1960s and the effect on the town by the publication of a steamy roman-a-clef that was written by a former teacher.
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Novel vrs Mystery, August 16, 2007
I won't repeat the story line since others have already done that. And in fact I will also pass on it's standing as a novel. I agree with others that the characters are mostly charming if a bit quirky and the sub-plot of linguistics is quite interesting. I'll chose instead to focus most of my remarks on it's place within the mystery genre. And here, unfortunately, it really doesn't hit the mark. My bias is toward mysteries that pull you along. That is, provide you with clues and diversions that engage you as the reader to match wits with the author. To see if you can solve the crime before everything is revealed. Naturally the best of these also have characters that we care about, scenes that feel alive and suspense that keeps you turning the pages. Double Negative does have interesting characters and the scenes do feel authentic but there really isn't any suspense and most of the clues center on who loves or hates Jeremy, not on whom the murderer might be. Enjoyable read, but don't go out of your way to find a copy.
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