Customer Reviews

Graveyard Eyes

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have a fondness for mysteries set in foreign locals. This is the second book in a 3 book series featuring Inspector Levant of Istanbul. I probably would have gone to the first book of the series if I had realized it. It is a fairly good mystery - more of a police procedural than a thriller. Even though you know where he is going fairly early on as the identity of the killer is apparent, he keeps the pace moving. I particularly like that the author avoids impossible feats of daring-do and improbable coincidence to make the story move forward. This e-book version was pretty well done with only minor editing errors.

I'm not sure about the rest of you but I'm becoming a bit disenchanted with some of the 99 cent self published books due to the need of serious editing on most of them. I also simply refuse to buy an e-book when they charge the same, and sometimes more, for the e-version than the paperback. It has stopped me from purchasing books by authors I want to read. This was offered with a good discount from the paperback version - about $2. For that you get a novel from an established author serviced by a competent editor.
I will probably purchase the next in this series but not right now.

Workmanlike thriller with an exotic setting, but no sense of time and place. Writing is serviceable, for the most part, with occasional lapses; characters are flat cutouts borrowed from fifty years of better writers. It is an OK read, if you have run out of Olen Steinhauer or Donna Leon or Henning Menkell and are waiting around for them to publish. Don't know if it is an ebook-specific problem or not, but a couple of paragraphs in the first third of the book are gibberish. NYTimes ad states "Nobody Knows Istanbul Like Inspector Levent." Perhaps. But he isn't sharing. Other than street names, the book could be set in any large city; no feel for life in Istanbul, the culture or the people. OK read, but only when you have nothing else.

My first David Chacko book. Gripping and superbly written. If you like Michael Connelly's books, as do I, you will love Graveyard Eyes.