Murder by Degrees

I wanted to love this book. It seemed like the perfect story for the mood I’ve been in lately – a murder mystery set in the late 1800s in Philadelphia.

While standing in the bookstore, I read the introduction and was hesitant based on the writing style, but the story seemed decent enough that I walked out of the store with it.

I should have trusted my instincts.

The writing style was simply not to my liking. Mukerji opted to go the “info dump” and “over-explanation” route in an attempt to make the characters relatable and likeable. For starters, I am not a fan of the info dump technique. When you meet someone, they don’t typically tell you their whole life’s story in the first 10 minutes…why should I know the character’s entire back story in the first 10 pages? Sure, there are facts that need to be established before you can really get to the heart of a story or a character, but I don’t need to know everything right away. Please, let’s leave a little bit of intrigue.

Several times (in the portion of the book I managed to get through), Mukerji was telling us the facts of the story or was setting the scene for the next important piece of information (these sections I enjoyed), and then promptly ripped us out of the scene-setting to tell us an impertinent backstory. I assume this was supposed to tell us more about the character in question, but instead it confused the story line, muddied the well-accomplished scene-setting, and quite frankly, irritated me.

The characters themselves fell flat to me. I could not find myself relating to them in any fashion. Despite the abundance of backstory, they felt extremely 2-dimensional. I felt like a 3rd party observer, being told by a friend about strangers I will never meet. I want the characters in the books I read to come alive – I want to feel like I know them personally.

This book was also written from several different points of view, which doesn’t bother me typically, and can actually pack a serious punch when executed correctly. However, from the 100 of 280 pages I managed to get through, I didn’t see the benefit of the multi-view writing. It served a minor purpose as far as info-dumping is concerned, but, by and large, made the story line feel jerky and interrupted.

There are plenty of folks who loved this book, and maybe one day I’ll attempt to re-tackle it, but as far as today is concerned, this was a DNF for me primarily due to writing style.