Ed McBain is a famous author, so when I was at the Library last time and I saw one of his books there, I decided to give it a try. I love detective stories and the plot seemed to be interesting.
The story is quite complicated and it’s not easy to describe it. The book “Romance” is about an actress Michelle Cassidy, who was stabbed by a knife and died. The actress had the main role as an Actress in a play that was called “Romance” and the play was about an actress being stabbed by a stranger with a knife. Clear? Great.
There is also a sub-story about a white detective Bert Kling, who investigates the death of the actress, and a black cop-doctor Sharyn Cooke.
From my point of view, the book was overcomplicated. First of all, in the book, the author of the play named all the characters anonymously like Actress or Detective, no actual names, so it was sometimes hard for the reader to realize and connect some pieces of the story. Secondly, many side plots were being described, that it was quite hard to focus on who was actually murdered and what is being investigated. Thirdly, I really didn’t like the acting of Kling and Cooke in the way of solving their racial differences. From the beginning, she was acting like a psychopath when whatever he said or did, she was convinced he did it because she was black. It just felt being added to the story too loosely.
As I already wrote, I have never read any other book from this author and so I cannot compare if this was one of his better or worse books but I didn’t enjoy reading this one. I actually had several quite hard times to force myself to continue reading the book. I think I will not really search for his other books. At least not in the near future.
My rating is 5/10.
Pinky Kidney 