I hate to admit this, but I did not really finish this book. I skipped ahead, and read the very confusing and unsatisfying ending. It has been two weeks since I started it, and I am less then two hundred pages in. The reason is simple: the book simply has not caught my attention. Here is what I think went wrong:a) too many characters and side stories. Slade dedicates whole (albeit short) chapters to people and their problems who just die off in the next chapter anyways.b) a constantly changing POV. Who is speaking? Sometimes I do not know until half way through a chapter.c) a writing style where the reader is too often left wondering "what just happened?". Just as Slade warms us up with a detailed description of a grisly murder scene, he changes direction with...d) another flashback. The time and setting change as often as the POV . He talks extensively about Jack the Ripper, then Aleister Crowley, then any number of controversial figures from the past. It takes away from the present story and murders.Maybe someday, I'll go back to this novel, but I doubt it. It is quite unusual that I give up on a novel, but, in the end, it seems like the right thing to do with this convoluted excuse for a mystery.
The last third of this book makes up for the first two thirds. I thought this was a very confusing book. In the first two thirds you get a lot of information; many character (with no apparent main character), information about serial killer (especially Jack the Ripper) and many departments of the Canadian Mounties (and the acronyms). A lot of this information could have been cut to make a more comprehensible story. Only in the last third of the book does everything come together and becomes apparent who the main character is.What confused me even more was Slade's tendency to constantly switch by calling his characters by their first and last name, often switching between sentences. There are many characters and switching between what he calls them I was constantly thrown out of the story by having to recall what character he is referring to.I almost stopped reading this book but I'm glad I persevered because the last part is good and hard to put down.
Do You like book Ripper (1994)?
It's a Slade book so increasingly large swathes of text read like excerpts from research packets, but the story is so much fun that you won't mind... Barely touching on the (devastating) cliffhanger from the end of Cutthroat (damn you, Slade!) and picking up about five years later (really now, damn you Slade!), Ripper is a deliberately and pleasurably classical whodunit, packed with references and filtered through Slade's uniquely hair-raising sensibility. The events on Deadman's Island, where a clutch of whodunit authors are gathered during a blizzard, forms the real hook of the story and would make for an excellent horror movie... bizarre when so much rubbish gets turned into cinema that Slade's first few books have not... (It was pretty much around the Ripper mark that the Special X series waned for me, I've read a couple of the later books but something of the demented energy of the first four was just... absent, it was also the tipping-point where the research tidbits took too much ground from the ripping yarns you bought the book for to begin with. If you only read the splendid first four then you will have had a blast...)
—Steve
I really got into the beginning of this book. It started off the way I like with a gruesome murder and went onto explaining the different classifications of serial killers and it was interesting.Then because the murderers were involved in the occult, using Tarot, etc. I feel the plot got too involved and detailed with the occult. I didn't really need to know everything there was to know about dating back to its roots.It picked back up with the "Mystery" weekend on Deadman's Island but it was like starting a new book again because I had lost interest.
—Diane
