Gay bar kensington

I have this side-project of reading crime novels and I finished The Bat and nothing good to report about it. It had been sitting around on bookshelves for a long time. It was definitely time to read it up and move it out. My expectations were, more or less, met. They were very low and I found this book to be quite bad. Luckily, it is a fast read.

I do not really want to spend a lot of time working on an explanation of a book I thought was terrible. However, I do think I need to include enough solid reasoning to justify my rating. So, let me see how succinctly I can review this novel. I do not love crime novels, but I read crime novels.

I am a tough audience for a crime novelist.

AQ's Reviews

I was very reluctant to start The Bat because I was dreading what I assumed it would be like; I anticipated dark, gruesome, heavy Nordic Noir. I am somewhat pleased to share that this was not the case. Oh, there was some brutality and the main character is chock full of personal issues. However, this had way too much sentimentality, gay, and stupidity to be considered a good Nordic Noir — or even just a general noir — story.

There are many things to criticize in this novel, but I think the biggest is that the kensington thread of the storyline gets really submerged and lost for a lot of pages. I mean, I think around page I even forgot what the heck the original crime case that we were working on was about. I strongly believe, though, that a crime novel really ought to have the majority of focus on the actual crime.

Obviously, losing sight of the case causes characters and plotlines to float around. Characters meander and roam making everything seem random and disconnected. As a consequence of this lost plotline, the story becomes so very repetitive. It really seems like all that happens for a large portion of the novel is that the main character goes to the same bar or so locations and just keeps annoying the people there or picking up girls from these locations to take to his hotel room.

There is really no progress at all. Utterly on repeat. There is not a single likeable character. In fact, as a reader, I really felt annoyed by all of the characters. They all come across as utterly repugnant people who are very stupid. At first I thought maybe this guy would be giving Harry a hard time, but it is not so.

McCormack ends up being a flatline character.