Customer Reviews

The Late Man

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

 

 

I got hooked into the story very early but it quickly looses steam. There were some interesting storylines for sure and I did find it moving at times. The writing is good and there is a great deal of character development but the plot takes a back seat and the story just seems to drag. I was not thrilled with the resolution of the "mystery" but as reviews will tell you it is certainly not the focus of the story. Perhaps it just my preference for plot based novels but I was happy to move on to something different.

Girard has an ability I usually don't find in this genre, to give detail of settings and people to make you feel you are there along side them. Rather than the typical supreficial, get to the story nature of mysteries, it goes several levels deeper. The people become very real and you care about them as much as you care about whodunnit. The people are not some stereotype. The weaving of contrasts and similarities between the three main characters puts us on a level with them, we've all been there in some way. What starts out as bleak lives, mistakes are made, hope is lost, leaves the reader feeling there is a future. I can't wait for his new novel to come out.

"The Late Man" is an elegiac, beautifully written novel whose story happens to fit the constraints of genre. But to say that it is not strictly speaking a "genre novel" is meant as praise; this is a beautiful book that sneaks up on you and lingers with you long after you have turned the last page. I recommend this book to all "genre" lovers- be they crime novels, detective novels, or murder mysteries- who want a little more weight, a little more feeling with their entertainments. "The Late Man" makes me hope that this was not a one shot from Mister Girard; that many more novels of this caliber will issue forth from him.

The writing is very smooth but the writer spent too much time to paint the veiled several key characters with very very long paragraphs, sometimes a whole page only got about 1-1/10 long paragraphs which were usually very tiresome to focus and read. The prose style writing may be very good but also kills the pace to an almost dragging, snailingly crawled monologue styled narration, just like the late man who rode a bus and look outside the window, the smoky glass made everything distant and vague and made the scenary going back and disappeared. A mystery should not be written like a some kind memorial stuff lingering in yesterday. Like a chess game, both players got to meet the time limits, reading a novel or mystery is the same thing, you just can't have too much time wasted in blabbing and making the reader waiting too long and too much