Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A master at work, 18 Jan 2003
Heart-felt, witty and frighteningly compulsive, crime thrillers, and fiction in general don't come much better than this. Police Chief Cuddy Mangum is a masterful creation: funny, eccentric and brilliantly iconoclastic, and makes a bewitching narrator. He is matched by a beautifully evoked cast of chracters inhabiting Malone's North Carolina town. Quite beside the obligatory thirller plotline, Malone and his idiosancratic narrator take us on many a diversion as he meanders through his tale. But this only adds to the wonder and magic of this peerless novel.Deep and richly written, this transcends mere crime thriller to create a vivid protrait of a town and its inhabitants, so creating a richly realised portrait of humanity to rank alongside the likes of Tolstoy. Funny, gripping and thrillingly thought-provoking, this is a book not to be missed.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well written but a bit slow, 7 Aug 2006
I bought this book after it was recommended to me by Amazon based on my previous purchases and also on the strength of its reviews.
It is not a bad book, in fact it is very well written, but it is a bit slow and ultimately disappointing. The characters although likeable and interesting seem to be made up of every cliche going. Southern Police Chief Cuddy Mangum, poor boy liberal and ex-Vietnam grunt, his ex-mental patient wisecracking partner old Southern moneyed Justin Saville the Fifth, a war hero wannabe senator, with a taste for extra marital sex who is surprise, surprise now married to Cuddy's childhood sweetheart who is definitely old money. Throw in the usual suspects, the KKK, local armed militias, crooked big business, crooked cops, a young black man on Death Row and an aging, eccentric but brilliant lawyer, an old cover up and there you have it.
Not exactly totally predictable but not particularly exciting either. For me it was not anywhere as good as the reviews suggested. Good enough that I will possibly try another book by the author but not right away.
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by Michael Malone
by Michael Malone
by Michael Malone
by Michael Malone
by Michael Malone
