Customer Reviews

The Great Mistake

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

 

 

Mary Robert Rinehart's The Great Mistake is a good commbination of mystery and romance. Her books are fairly humerous and I recomend them. The Great Mistake is not one of my favorites (I perfer Rinehart's The Circular Staircase) but still a good book worth taking a look at. One of the things I like about Rinehart is her 1st person narrative style. I like to see the story through a character's eyes.

This book is 368 pages long, but it seemed like 1000. It felt like the book could easily have been half as long and lost nothing worthwhile. None of the characters - including the insufferable narrator - are believable human beings, and nothing the slightest bit interesting happens in the entire book.

The problem is not that this book and its author are from the relatively distant past (first half of the 20th century), because they are roughly contemporary with Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L Sayers, and even Christie's books are entertaining if not literary masterpieces (which Sayers's are).

The Great Mistake is just coy and annoying. By the time the murderer was revealed (on page 364) I no longer cared. In fact, I NEVER cared, because I didn't care about anybody in the book. I would have been delighted if ALL the characters had been killed off by page ten and the remaining 358 pages had been blank.

If this just happens to be Rinehart's worst book by far, it's a shame, because I will never read another one.