Wow... Brutal and unflinching look at the extent of human cruelty wrapped in a 1790s mystery. ( )

Is mòr a dh’ fhuilingeas cridhe ceart mas bris e.
The upright heart endures a great deal before it breaks. ( )

Swedish chuckles. ( )

Definitely not my cup of tea... ( )

So this was ... disgusting. And I don't mean the murder, I mean literally everything else. The book is nothing but poop, piss, dirt, crude comments about sex, prostitutes, more dirt, more piss, more poop, rape, blood, bodily fluids, and so on and so on. I get it, back in 1793 there wasn't a single clean surface anywhere and no one was happy ever. Everyone was constantly drunk and cold and dirty and happiness wasn't invented until 1977 when the first Star Wars movie was released. Before that it was a constant struggle from the moment you're born until you die (probably in a gruesome way). It gets old, fast.

I don't get the hype behind this book, and maybe I should be nicer in my review since it's a debut by this author, but it's been hyped enough that I don't feel like I need to cut back. It is very obviously written by an amateur. There are a few very nice sentences going around (which I guess is why everyone is raving about the language?), but the dialogue is so bad it ruins it for me. It literally uses the word "shitstorm" which I am pretty sure did not exist some 200 years ago. Many times you can tell the author thought up the dialogue in English and translated it to Swedish, and a lot of the time it takes me right out of the story ("Pain is just weakness leaving the body"? My only association is motivational posters ... and at point it essentially quotes Return of the King).

Not to mention the amount of "California scenes" in this book: when two character who just met suddenly spill their most intimate secrets to each other for absolutely no other reason than that we the readers should probably know this about the character. That's not how you do it, I'm sorry. And it gets old fast, especially since all the characters are so incredibly flat that their backstory doesn't even matter.

All of this could've been saved if the central mystery had been good enough, but it's not, it's just torture porn. Who did it is extremely uninteresting in the end, because it doesn't really affect the story at all. It's supposed to be this "crazy monster" who is the culprit and he is about as flat as any other character. I just don't buy his motivation (and it's totally not homophobic to have the only gay character be super-evil) at all, and there's no build-up to him doing what is probably one of the most evil things a person can come up with. He plants a thing about butterflies (I know it's not butterflies but I don't care enough to translate the actual word, you get the point) getting their wings torn off and him torturing small animals as a kid but that's not enough for me. I don't buy it. I would be upset about what happened to the poor victim, but none of these characters seem real so I'm more upset about myself having to read about it.

The positive thing is the language flows and this is an easy read, and definitely think the author could write something good ... but given the story here I'm sure it will not be something that interests me. Not that it matters, the book is selling like crazy and everyone else loves it, so it does not need me. ( )