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A review by saranel81
Murder on Lenox Hill by Victoria Thompson
2.0
I love turn-of-the-century mystery stories, but this really fell kind of flat. For me, the setting was never really evoked - I never really got the feeling of gaslight-era New York, it could have been any random big city. There was effort there, but nothing connected to anything else, like looking at random snapshots and trying to force a story that's not there.
The mystery was lame, in that it didn't go anywhere. I like a story where the sleuth is a step ahead of me, not where I'm three steps ahead of him. For two people who are supposed to be clever about solving crimes, the two protagonists made obvious connections 40 pages after I did. The murder - when it finally came - was laughably easy to solve. And with people lining up to confess to it, it felt less like a taut mystery and more like a comedy of errors. And I just kept smacking my head at how ridiculously obtuse the sleuths were being.
Given the setting and the set-up, I wanted to like this story, but it was just okay. Not sure if I'd read anything else by Thompson. Maybe one more, just to give her the benefit of the doubt. But I'm really hoping for more mystery and less . . . whatever it is that I got.
The mystery was lame, in that it didn't go anywhere. I like a story where the sleuth is a step ahead of me, not where I'm three steps ahead of him. For two people who are supposed to be clever about solving crimes, the two protagonists made obvious connections 40 pages after I did. The murder - when it finally came - was laughably easy to solve. And with people lining up to confess to it, it felt less like a taut mystery and more like a comedy of errors. And I just kept smacking my head at how ridiculously obtuse the sleuths were being.
Given the setting and the set-up, I wanted to like this story, but it was just okay. Not sure if I'd read anything else by Thompson. Maybe one more, just to give her the benefit of the doubt. But I'm really hoping for more mystery and less . . . whatever it is that I got.