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wathohuc's review
4.0
SPOILER WARNING: I'm not usually one for the noir genre, and after reading this, I can confirm that this is still not my favorite genre. Not that the story or the writing was bad. In fact, both were actually quite good. Warren Moore has an easy and elegant writing style. It flows smoothly and the pages turn easily. But after the novel ended, I felt the story was a bit wanting. There was so much more that I think the story needed and which Moore could have easily told. Now, for those who would say that this is true of any book, my reply would be ... yes, of course, but sometimes character development requires more to elucidate core characteristics that are clearly introduced as important to the main protagonists. I found that I knew very little about the interior life of Kenny (the main protagonist), beyond his interest in music, his work in a band, and his hyper-sexual relationship (described perhaps a bit to regularly, graphically, and gratuitously) with the crazy Jean. There's absolutely nothing that would ever indicate that Kenny is capable first of cold-blooded murder, and then of a casual murder-suicide. I wanted to know more about Kenny, about those things in his life that would explain this seemingly uncharacteristic behavior. I mean, he's basically a very nice, sane, seemingly happy, even compassionate guy who inexplicably does a couple of very uncharacteristically violent things -- without even the hint of any kind of mental or psychological illness. Unlike Jean, whom we come to know as a disturbed person, there is nothing truly disturbing at all about Kenny. I also think the ending was a bit rushed and actually seemed forced, as if Moore just reached a point where he felt he had to end the book without really having arrived at the appropriate moment in the character development and story narrative for its conclusion. But I gave this book a 4-star ranking because Moore's talent as a writer in the "nuts-and-bolts" sense of style, form, language use, narrative structure, etc., is very good and very polished.
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