- Disappointing really. I was expecting a far more powerful novel given all the hype that surrounded it - fawning reviews from other major crime writers like Don Winslow and Adrian McKinty.
- It’s a standard chase story, a genre that has little power in the end - ‘this happened, then that happened; they went here, then there’, etc.
- The conclusion is lame in the extreme, and very emotionally unsatisfying. The hero gives up and allows himself to be ended, virtually committing suicide. And the deaths of all the key and interesting characters along the way comfortably removes the necessity for any dramatic and imaginative resolutions.
- A major structural problem is that Carlos Marcello, the Mafia crime boss considered by many historians to have organised Kennedy’s assassination, and who chased down and eliminated all his associates to protect himself, is a real figure who died thirty years later. That seriously restricts the novel’s fictional options. It becomes a hybrid of fact/fiction, constricted both ways.
- Also, that the core narrative of the love story peters out with little drama is a real and irritating weakness.
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