Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I read a review copy that came stuffed with publicity material, so perhaps my expectations were too high. The suspense depends on the deliberate withholding of information (a common enough contrivance in this genre), with each chapter carefully delivering a small new dose of revelation. But the game quickly became too mechanical for me, and I found myself skimming impatiently -- so apologies if I missed something. Here are a few things that ultimately bothered me. (SPOILER ALERT!! SPOILER ALERT!!) This criticism, I notice, has been voiced already, but it's pretty fundamental: The narrator's brother is supposed to be a famous Dutch politician who's just about to run for -- what is it, president, premier, prime minister... whatever. He's a national celebrity. (In fact, during the dinner a man and his daughter come up to him, complete strangers, and ask to take a photo.) And the purpose of the dinner, we learn, is so that the politician and his wife, and the narrator and HIS wife, can come clean with one another and discuss what to do about the fact that their respective teenage sons are homicidal psychopaths currently wanted for a murder that has shocked all Europe. Now, you'd think the last place the politician would want this crucial (and shady) meeting to be held would be at a crowded high-priced high-end restaurant with every other patron eyeing the foursome, waiters in attendance, etc. What an unlikely choice! And then, peculiarly, the subject of the sons and their crime doesn't even come up till late in the dinner; before that it's basically small talk. Later still, the narrator reveals to us that he himself is a homicidal psychopath who, among his other transgressions, has -- just a few years ago, while in a rage -- assaulted said brother with a red-hot frying pan, leaving the man's face and head bloody. Yet there's no hint of this past incident during the dinner, no sign of anger or fear or bitterness or desire for revenge on the part of the once-injured brother. (Or if there is, I must have missed it.) Indeed, we see the former victim contentedly taking the brother and his wife out for the expensive meal that gives the book its title. Finally, at the end of the book -- by which time I may not have been following carefully enough, as I was skimming even faster -- the wife of the narrator, who turns out to be herself a sort of homicidal-psychopath enabler, commits a similar crime in an effort to make sure the politician brother doesn't make a public confession of the two teenage boys' culpability. To prevent his guiltily revealing the family secret, she smashes in his face with a wine glass, leaving him permanently disfigured. Yet somehow this attack does the trick; the man is prevented from spilling the beans, he recovers and attempts to go on with his political career, and the cover-up proves successful. To which one can only say, WTF? This seems perfectly ridiculous! Other things struck me as implausible as well... like the narrator's mysterious medical condition, one that predisposes him to fly into murderous rages, a condition that, we learn, has once led a psychologist to warn the narrator against fathering a child. I don't believe in that neat psychological condition, and I don't believe that a shrink would speak that way; it all sounds like something out of a Victorian melodrama. And then there's the brother's wife, who turns suddenly and inexplicably nasty toward a waiter... It comes out of nowhere and left me baffled. But in the end what's most mysterious to me, of course, are the good reviews that this improbable concoction seems to have inspired. Does the genre really set that low a bar?