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A review by tobyyy
Otto di spade by Antonietta Maria Francavilla, John Dickson Carr
3.0
Unread shelf project 2020: book 12.
This was a golden age mystery by a contemporary of Agatha Christie. However, I can see why (at least if this is a fairly generalized example of his work) Carr is not as well-known and well-loved as Christie. There were far too many characters in this book to easily keep straight (at least for me), and there were a lot of farcical scenes that made me struggle a bit.
This is definitely not a cozy mystery but I will be real, I didn’t guess the whodunit and it was quite a clever one. The mystery was decent but I did get swamped with all of the characters and the speed at which they were introduced. It felt a bit like I needed to do a genogram to keep all of them and their family members and other relations straight! This was the biggest thing that detracted from my enjoyment.
However, I liked the character of Fell; I have a few other books by Carr on my shelf, so I’ll probably meet Fell another time, during another murder investigation. This was not so difficult a book to make me refuse to read others by Carr.
This was a golden age mystery by a contemporary of Agatha Christie. However, I can see why (at least if this is a fairly generalized example of his work) Carr is not as well-known and well-loved as Christie. There were far too many characters in this book to easily keep straight (at least for me), and there were a lot of farcical scenes that made me struggle a bit.
This is definitely not a cozy mystery but I will be real, I didn’t guess the whodunit and it was quite a clever one. The mystery was decent but I did get swamped with all of the characters and the speed at which they were introduced. It felt a bit like I needed to do a genogram to keep all of them and their family members and other relations straight! This was the biggest thing that detracted from my enjoyment.
However, I liked the character of Fell; I have a few other books by Carr on my shelf, so I’ll probably meet Fell another time, during another murder investigation. This was not so difficult a book to make me refuse to read others by Carr.