Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I chose this book based on the high reviews, but I was overall disappointed with it. I felt that it was Girl With the Dragon Tattoo meets White Collar, but instead of being entertaining, suspenseful and well developed, it was a fairly flat narrative of the events. This book has a ton of potential and could be a fantastic story, but it is poorly executed. It is an easy read, but many times I wanted to put it down because the author never succeeded in creating any suspense or tension. I finished the book only because I wanted to know who Piros was and how the art forgeries were related to murders and the theft of weapons. We learn who Piros is (and it’s no surprise) but none of the other aspects of the case are ever fully resolved. The whole ending is very anti-climactic. The writing and storytelling were weak at best. Quirks of Genevieve’s become redundant and as a reader I wanted to scream “STOP! I know. You’ve told me about the orbicularis oculi muscles about a hundred times.” And those little muscles… let me tell you! Genevieve can tell everything about you from them. Genevieve uses cues from these muscles to “read” people and the author uses it as a means to dismiss suspicion of new characters without having to actually develop the character and provide a basis for their trustworthiness. We are also reminded with nearly every encounter about Genevieve’s aversion to physical contact, and also reminded repetitively every time Colin touches her that she is surprised at how much she doesn’t mind him touching her. Genevieve is autistic and does not understand the euphemisms, metaphors, and figures of speech that are used by the other characters. This woman who holds a Ph.D., yet somehow hasn’t learned the most common phrases and sayings. I find it extremely unlikely that after all that education she wouldn’t have learned what these phrases mean to others even if she finds them meaningless. She knows a lot about “reading” people based upon body language, but knows seemingly nothing about the spoken word. Contradicting this character trait is the fact that the book is narrated in the first person by Genevieve, who uses many more complex and less common figures of speech than the ones she gets stumped by when others use them. For example, Genevieve is clueless when the following phrases are used: “My boss is riding my arse,” “I could kiss you right now” (when someone was thrilled with her work) and she does not know what a goon is, what being anal means, or what it means to be “sweet on you.” However, she uses phrases like “Relief stole my breath,” “bring me down a peg or two,” “cruising for a bruising,” and “above board.” The worst one from this Ph.D. educated woman is on page 192: “Were they primates, they might have started beating their chests.” Uh, sweetie, humans are primates.