Lancaster Reading Group: The Interpretation of Murder- Jed Rubenfeld

It's fair to say I wouldn't have touched this book with a 10 foot barge pole if it hadn't of been the title selected for my reading group last month. It has the icky 'Richard and Judy'/ in every charity shop for 50p/ generic man walking on a sepia cover-ness about it to really turn me off. To add further insult to injury a copy of said masterpiece had been languishing on my shelf for at least 2 years before me finally deciding to cull it and send it to the charity shop a few weeks ago. Also I hate Freud.

My major issue with books like this is the blatant name-dropping in order to sell books. The author (or perhaps more likely their publisher) tries to sell the book by making the reader feel more intellectual than they actually are. I believe the thought process runs something like "I always wanted to study psychology... ugh those psychology textbooks are big and boring looking... ZOMFG! HERE IS A FICTION BOOK ABOUT FREUD, I CAN GET CLEVER WITHOUT HAVING TO TRY LOLZ". This is particularly painful in this book as Freud is really a fairly minor character, who mostly sits in his hotel room being smug and wetting himself.

And speaking of trying to be clever, isn't Mr. Rubenfeld the smarty-pants? What the author doesn't know about New York, Psychology and Architecture isn't worth knowing, and apparently the reader needs to be told ALL OF IT. These snippets of information, while generally quite interesting, feel forced into the story. This makes the author come across as smug and patronising, which is never a good thing.

Anyway THE STORY is your fairly typical whodunit, and it is the need to know who did the rather raunchy and attention grabbing murder in the first few pages of the novel that kept me reading. Of course the actual answer to that question is VERY convoluted and complicated and wrapped up in sex and psychology and femme fatals and secret passageways and OH NO I'VE GONE CROSS EYED. Honestly by the end I still wasn't sure who had done it, or even if it had been 'done' at all!

All that said it wasn't that bad. I read it. I didn't vom. It was meh.

2 out of 5 stars, for the sheer fact that I didn't guess who did it within 50 pages.