Apparently.
Don't get me wrong. I get that this is supposed to be really good. But because my formative reading years were spent steeped in the lore of R.L. Stine, I can't help but prefer mysteries that I can try to figure out on my own, not waiting for the author to reveal it all with some information he withheld.
And listen, I know that maybe they do mysteries differently abroad. But for about seven-eighths of the book, I had no goddamn idea who the bad guy was supposed to be, and the last eighth was spent explaining how this guy was the bad guy.
Let me paint the picture for you: A guy wakes up super hungover and having blacked out a lot of what happened the night before. He discovers his wife dead in the bathtub. The trial follows and he is convicted of having killed her, primarily because it doesn't seem like anyone else could have. Then he winds up dead in his room at the mental institution, where he had been sent because he couldn't remember whether he had killed her or not.
There were a few things that could have made this better, and I'm taking it on faith that it wasn't just lost in translation. (For the record, this isn't the first translated novel I've ever read. That would be Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. So I do have an idea of what a good translation can do.)
The first thing that would have been nice is if the main character, Inspector Van Veeteren, had been sure all throughout the trial that Janek Mitter had killed his wife. Then, when he turns up dead later, we could have had some development in the form of questioning his resolution and being unsure of his ability to do his job. It would have been nice, at least.
The second thing? Some goddamn proper nouns. For fuck's sake. A lot of chapters, a lot of chapters, begin by talking about "he". Who the fuck is he? You have an almost exclusively male cast. Who the fuck is he?! I had to frequently skim ahead a couple paragraphs and even pages in order to get a single idea of who was being talked about here and there. If Nesser didn't specify in the original text, I would not have been grumpy if the translator had slipped a couple proper nouns at the beginning of those chapters so we as readers wouldn't be sitting there shouting "Huh?".
The third thing I mentioned already. I prefer mysteries that, if I really sat and thought about, I could maybe figure it out. And if I couldn't, it being clear enough that I can go "Ohhh" and complete understand where the author was going. In this case, the author divulges a bunch of unknown information at the end that made no sense in relation to the rest of the book. Incestual affairs? Since when? And it's some character we haven't even had mentioned yet in the story? Go to jail.
It's obviously not the worst book in the world, but I didn't find it super great. I was also irritated with how preoccupied with badminton Inspector Van Veeteren was while trying to do his job. Listen. I don't give a shit. Solve the mystery, dammit.
3.0/10
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