It was very good but not as compelling as his other works that I read recently. Perhaps it was meant to feel that way - a bit meandering, wooly, even - due to his brain cancer. Great unguessable denouement.

From my librarytart blog: http://librarytart.wordpress.com/2008...

50-word description
Cop turned private investigator Nick Petrov takes on a missing person case that turns sinister when his instincts are muddled after suffering amnesia. While ailing and undergoing urgent medical treatment, he valiantly tries to remember and solve the case while an unknown assailant gets in his way.

150-word review
I’ll start with the most interesting part of the book: Abrahams gives Nick Petrov the character a solid voice as clever arsehole evolving into sick man with a conscience. Nick’s attempts to get his life on track are believable and almost keep the book from turning into a phantasmagoria of unlikely coincidences.

However, the rest of his battle to solve the missing girl case while squeezing in treatment for a virulent form of brain cancer verges on the ridiculous. Oh, and a very nasty person gets him while he’s down and tries to kill him. And, although he can’t remember the case he is working on, informants and suspects happen to be in the right places at the right time to toss him clues like a Labrador retriever catches tennis balls.

Then he gets the girl. Of course.

Found in
Fiction A

Borrowed
Dec 08

Rating
Overblown ( )

somewhat difficult to follow but good ( )

So it’s not a bad book.
The writing is okay, but it’s also nothing to write home about.
Entertainment Weekly’s review of it is a certainly over the top:

"You know you're holding a first-rate thriller when you take it with you in the car to read at stoplights."
- Entertainment Weekly. Grade: A. (Jennifer Reese)

First of all, EW, if your need to read is that intense might I suggest that you take an alternate form of transportation from place to place? Secondly, if this book makes you want to read it a stoplights, I fear what would happen if you read something that was actually thrilling, or in fact, in any way exciting. Because this book is neither of those things. The guy from the LA Times must have been reading a different book than me, because, “exciting and out of the ordinary... full of funny, touching and alarming surprises...” is pretty much the opposite of how I would describe this book. ( )

PI Nick Petrov-great characters ( )