Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It can be a nuisance when you get something, a book, a movie, a game, expecting one thing and receiving something completely different. Take Mr. Peanut, for example. If you were to read the synopsis, you'd think it was a murder mystery with a tinge of familial drama, concerning David and Alice Pepin. Alice, deathly allergic to peanuts, is found dead, having eaten said peanuts. The police think David's to blame. Okay, then take the back of the advanced readers' copy that reads, "...when Adam Ross asked me to read what he'd been working on far longer than the eight years we'd known each other, I was in for an extraordinary surprise...And I was soon thrilled (again) to see it take Knopf by storm, reader by reader, department by department--an occurrence that signals a truly exceptional book." Okay, so we have an interesting premise and a very highly praised congratulatory note by no less than the Vice President, Editor-at-Large of Random House. What I got out of Mr. Peanut, instead, was something completely different...and nowhere near as exciting. True, David and Alice Pepin are characters and true Alice does die from a peanut...this happens in the first few pages. But the story doesn't really center around the Pepins so much. I'd almost call their story a MacGuffin except that they do get circled back to, because the plot quickly spirals away from them and toward the two detectives who are working his case. You see, all of the men in this book have problems with their wives. And all of the women in this book have problems with the men. Neither side are exactly shining examples of their genders. The women all seem to be depressed that married life and their husbands aren't what they're cracked up to be. Meanwhile, the men all seem destined to do things (sometimes eye-rollingly preposterous things) to screw up their relationships. Take Ward Hastroll, one of the detective working the Pepin case. His wife decides not to leave the bed for months and Hastroll does everything (wrong) in his power to get her out of it, including refusing to feed her, trying to sell away everything. It's very soapy and borders on the ridiculous at times. Then there's Sam Sheppard, the other detective, whose wife was murdered years ago and he was/is the prime suspect. I'd like to focus on what I thought was the point of this book--David Pepin--but the truth is that his life only gets a very cursory look. His wife has been yo-yoing through weight loss and it, apparently, makes her bitchy. Meanwhile, he reacts as an ass and...well that's about it. She dies. The brunt of the book is about Hastroll and Sheppard and how they screwed up their marriages. In fact, more ink is spent in a quasi-Silence of the Lambs ("quid pro quo" is actually mentioned) interrogation with someone who is apparently well-versed in Sheppard's familial history and the murder of his wife. And so for a good chunk of the book, we're going back and forth between the present and Sheppard's past, piecing together who killed his wife. Never mind that the book is named Mr. Peanut and all signs point to a story about the Pepins. In an attempt to be inspired, author Adam Ross attempts his hand at writing a meta-story to try and be, I assume, post modern, by adding Sheppard's story to the mix. I didn't know it when I read the book, but it turns out that Sam Sheppard is a real person, who inspired the story of The Fugitive. I had to wiki him, because his story was a bit before me, but it seems to be a pretty sensational story, the way the Michael Jackson/OJ Simpson trials were. By adding this story, Ross tries his hand at offering a solution to the mysterious case and somehow tie it back to the David/Alice Pepin storyline. But, in truth, it doesn't add anything to the story and in fact ends up detracting. Too much time is spent rehashing the story and the problem is that the people who know the story will want to keep flipping through it because it'd be well-known to them; meanwhile, to those, like me, who had no idea it's based on a real person, it feels like filler. I wanted to give up on this book for awhile and turn my attentions to more promising works (like The Passage), but I stuck with it in hopes that things would improve. They don't, really. I was mildly intrigued with how the murder mystery unravelled. It pulled some of the parts together into an interesting package, but it wasn't enough. Instead of focusing on the central story, Ross allows his prose to get ahead of him and goes to far in his ambitions. It just doesn't support what he wanted to do, I don't think. What we're left with are characters who react in soap opera ways and two murder mysteries that aren't mysterious or interesting. Not impressed.