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A review by shreyas1599
Il cantuccio della strega by John Dickson Carr
3.0
A decent countryside mystery. The beginning one-third of the book was a tad boring. There was a lot of talk about supernatural elements and I didn't really find the story to be picking up pace. For that reason, I put off completing the story for a long while. I looked through my Currently Reading list yesterday and decided to close out some of them. Hag's Nook was on that list and I decided to give it another chance.
The remainder of the book was written at a pace more suited to my liking. The story has all the usual elements of a countryside mystery. A small pool of murder suspects - and everyone's character arc given ample time. The number of characters was fairly limited so it wasn't hard for me to pick up where I left off when I resumed reading the story from the 30% mark after a couple of months. That is a point in the book's favour, in my opinion.
However, in this particular book, suspicion was not drawn to all of the characters. It was sort of impossible to guess with any degree of certainty who the murderer could have been. I don't think (maybe I am not as observant as I make myself out to be) there were enough clues scattered about for the reader to take a gander at who the murderer could've been.
For that and the slow 1/3rd of the book (albeit the novel being short), I give this only 3.5 stars.
The remainder of the book was written at a pace more suited to my liking. The story has all the usual elements of a countryside mystery. A small pool of murder suspects - and everyone's character arc given ample time. The number of characters was fairly limited so it wasn't hard for me to pick up where I left off when I resumed reading the story from the 30% mark after a couple of months. That is a point in the book's favour, in my opinion.
However, in this particular book, suspicion was not drawn to all of the characters. It was sort of impossible to guess with any degree of certainty who the murderer could have been. I don't think (maybe I am not as observant as I make myself out to be) there were enough clues scattered about for the reader to take a gander at who the murderer could've been.
For that and the slow 1/3rd of the book (albeit the novel being short), I give this only 3.5 stars.