Dead Man's Puzzle by Parnell Hall

This is the first time I've run in to Hall's Puzzle Lady Mystery series.  I have mixed feelings about it.

This is one mystery where it was not that easy to decipher the killer half way through the book, and I appreciate the complexity of the process that went in to constructing the book.  I don't happen to be a puzzle addict, so I did not take the time to try to solve the puzzles myself.  If I had the book would have taken me a lot longer.  I'm also not that familiar with Soduku, which I realize is very popular right now.  Soduku lovers will love this book.

What bothered me was the disjointedness of the dialogue.  The sleuth, Cora Felton, a puzzle creator who can't solve her own puzzles to save her life, has a thought process that is akin to someone who is ADHD or possibly bipolar, and that makes her dialogue and her thoughts difficult to follow.  It all hangs together in the end, but it is easy to get tangled up in the process.  The short, choppy dialogue makes the book at the same time a fast read, and a confusing one.

The other thing that bothered me about the book is the book's design.  I usually don't complain about this.  I appreciate the work that publishers do to create the finished product.  This time, the changes in typeface between headings, pagination and the body of the page make the work hard to read and detract from it to some extent.  Perhaps this contributes to the sense of disjointedness in the work.

I can't say that I got involved with the main character the way I do with my favorite mystery writers, and so I will probably not go out of my way to read another or to go back in the series to read some of the earlier books in the series. 

However, the subject and the writing style will appeal to many readers. I can understand why Parnell Hall has a following.

Liz Nichols