A Season for the Dead (2004) by David Hewson
Good Reads meta-data is 496 pages, rated 3.60 by 2569 litizens.
Genre: Krimi; Species: Thriller; Sub-species: Oh hum.
DNA: Italy.
Verdict: Dan Brown wanna be.
Tagline: My disbelief remained undisturbed.
It starts in the Vatican Library, a place I would like to see, where a woman, having gained the necessary permissions, is consulting…a cookbook. It went down hill from there.
Titillation without substance follows for hundreds of pages. All the women are mysteriously beautiful. The men are handsome and, well, manly. The sex is plentiful. The stereotypes are working overtime. All the many murders are elaborately cruel, gruesome, and detailed. A more descriptive title would have been A Season at the Abattoir.
Leaden prose, place name dropping but no ambience. All the ingredients for well received book on Good Reads: Vacuous and trite. (My, I am feeling grumpy today.) Instead of plot or character we have an enveloping conspiracy of the unnamed and unseen others.
First in a series for those strong of stomach and weak of mind.
***
Written in that fractured thriller style back-and-forth between characters and settings that leaves me cold.
I chose it for opening scene in Vatican Library, but it is just a site for some gaudy, gruesome, and cheap thrills. Might as well have been an abattoir. I tried to read it years ago and stopped, trying again to get my money’s worth out of it, a duty not a pleasure, interest, or diversion