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| Still Life With Crows |
I haven’t read a serial killer novel in a long time, but I’ve been intrigued by what I’ve read about the main character, Agent Pendergast, that I’ve been wanting to read these books. And I really enjoyed The Cabinet of Curiosities, which I read, I think, last year or the year before. Still Life with Crows was the first book in the series that I happened to have in my collection, so I decided to start with it. Judging by what I read in the Wikipedia entry for Pendergast, I didn’t really want to read the first two anyway.
When I started reading Still Life, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to make it through. At first, it seemed to me that Pendergast was just a collection of eccentricities, rather than an actual personality. At first, he really got on my nerves in the way that old style detectives like Holmes and Poirot get on my nerves. But after a while, Pendergast grew on me, possibly because a lot of the other characters were jerks.
The other thing I liked about this book was the plot. Considering how many mysteries Ive read, it’s gotten kind of easy for me to predict where the book is going to go. I may not know who done it, but I can usually figure out how the book is going to resolve itself. With Still Life, I had no clue what was going on ’till almost the very end of the book. Child and Preston were very good in this book about setting up the possibility of a supernatural killer that it stayed on my mental set of solutions, instead of being dismissed early on. And this helped make the book a very creepy read.