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A review by ashleylm
Death Qualified - A Mystery of Chaos by Kate Wilhelm
2.0
I thought I'd enjoy this one more than I did, but it steered too close to sci-fi for me. I suppose every novel is in some sense a sci-fi or fantasy (there never was a Mr. Darcy, after all) but rather than positing "what if so-and-so killed so-and-so" (the typical mystery postulation) it ventured much, much further into sci-fi territory, creating an uncomfortable (for me) amalgam.
For some reason when thrillers do this (e.g. Crichton) it seems perfectly reasonable, if MacGuffin-ish, but when tossed into a legal mystery it seemed very out of place. (Eventually it steered into suspense thriller territory too, but too late to make everything seem all right again--if anything, it was just one more element too many, in an already long book).
I suspect the sci-fi elements are what interested the author, and the mystery is a vessel for containing them. She may be pleased, but it didn't work for me.
(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!)
For some reason when thrillers do this (e.g. Crichton) it seems perfectly reasonable, if MacGuffin-ish, but when tossed into a legal mystery it seemed very out of place. (Eventually it steered into suspense thriller territory too, but too late to make everything seem all right again--if anything, it was just one more element too many, in an already long book).
I suspect the sci-fi elements are what interested the author, and the mystery is a vessel for containing them. She may be pleased, but it didn't work for me.
(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!)