February 4, 2005

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  I finished Michael Connelly’s The Poet.
  It’s the second Connelly I’ve read and he doesn’t disappoint. Solid
  police procedural, and a fairly intriguing plot written in a sparse
  style common in American crime genre. The book had me hooked and I
  finally came to the last page at almost 4 am.

   

  Unlike
  Connelly's Harry Bosch series, the hero this time is Jack McEvoy, a
  crime reporter who turns sleuth when his twin brother is found dead
  from a supposedly self-inflicted wound. You have the usual red herring
  tossed early into the game but the final twist was a twist too many.

   

  Keeping
  your aces out of sight is fine, but the tale ended on
  an anti-climax - which has given Connelly an excuse to bring the
  Poet back in a new Bosch thriller (The Narrows, which I haven't read but I will, eventually).

   

  But The Poet is the easier read compared to Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation. A blogger wrote that life’s too short to be spent on books that do not satisfy. If they don’t grip you, give it up and move on, she said. And believe me, I have been tempted to give up on Philip Kerr.

   

  A Philosphical Investigation
  has a clever premise with a literary/philosophical bent; the reader who
  keeps company with Plato, Socrates, and above all Wittgenstein (from
  whom Kerr borrowed the title of this book), will find the story er,
  intellectually stimulating. Sometime in the near future, genetic
  profiling becomes the norm and a serial killer decides to do society a
  favour by bumping off similarly tainted individuals.

   

  The
  philosophy of Wittgenstein (who once declared himself Bertrand
  Russell’s superior) provides the canvas for an exploration of mental
  states, language and symbolism, etc, which to my mind makes for an
  unsatisfactory mystery of the whodunit type. Police Chief
  Inspector Isadora ‘Jake’ Jakowicz jumps through the requisite hoops to
  get her man while readers are entertained to a dialectic on logic and
  reality. Not for anyone who’s looking for a less taxing diversion.

   

  But
  there are interesting thoughts on philosophy and crime detection here
  which as a professor tells Jake, are similar disciplines: both "detection and philosophy promote the idea that something can be known."
  At the heart of each endeavour is a search for clues that must fit
  together, and a questioning of assumptions and presuppositions, for
  truth to be revealed.

  • 2:48 am
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