Book Review : H is for Homicide

I've decided to resurrect this blog as a reviews blog. It might work better than just a blog for random thoughts. This entry is interestingly not the first book review entry but hopefully it'll spark off a series of reviews and bring some life back into this blog.

From the Big Bad Wolf Book Sale, I brought myself more than 10 novels so this will probably be the first review of that book pile.

H is for Homicide is the first book I choose to read from the pile and the first book i've ever read by Sue Grafton. I've heard of Sue Grafton through recommendations by friends and through googling about detective/mystery stories.

Sue Grafton's book titles follows the Alphabet. I'm not quite sure how many she has written and whether she's reached the alphabet Z but I picked H for Homicide for the most obvious reasons. I love a good murder mystery.

So imagine my disappointment that the murder was just an incidental incident. Yes there was a murder, a body and then all else was forgotten, in a sense. Half way through the book, you don't even remember that there's been a murder. It plays such an insignificant part of the book that you really wonder why it was called H is for Homicide.

I"m alright with her writing style though her protagonist, Kinsey Millhone has what i would consider, a really boring job. She's attached to an insurance company and her job is to investigate potentially fraudulent insurance claims.

To be honest, i thought there was not enough "murder" or "mystery" in this book. Firstly, not enough attention was given to the murder. Something about needing to be low key about the murder for the bigger issue at hand. And the bigger issue at hand was an insurance scam. No mystery about it. There were some thrilling moments , when Kinsey's life was in danger but other than that, it was pretty straight forward.

So as a murder mystery it fails terribly. As a suspense novel, it did better. It had its moments but not the moments I look for in a good mystery novel. I doubt i'll be bothered to purchase Sue Grafton's other novels. As a novel by itself, without actually putting it in the murder mystery genre, I think I'll give it a 3 out of 5. At least i still manage to reach the last page.