I feel like the schtick wore out on me for this one. I read the first one and I liked a lot about it, and I thought it had a lot of potential as a series. I keep chasing a dragon, and that is series like Tana French and Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling, or also writers like Megan Abbott, Sara Gran, and Gillian Flynn. I have the same issue with Stephen King, a misunderstanding that it’s not so much that I am into a specific genre, but that I like specific writers. It’s much easier to ignore or put this aside for literary fiction. If I don’t like a classic novel, I usually have more confidence to just state that outright, but with books I am less familiar with or feel like an outsider, I feel like I should let others.
Anyway, I am giving this one a rest and not going on. This book was almost a direct rehash of the first book, but was also less compelling. It’s like once the romance of the first book was settled, and five years on, we are required to also go through the period of a kind of doldrums of the marriage here as well. The book goes back to same murders from before, still has the issue of overly romanticizing the racism of Orientalism, while also trying to claim some credit for progressive views on women. So it’s a little hard to reconcile both in the same book.
It also has the very terrible problem of most Americans cannot convincingly render British characters. The Henry James’s and Connie Willis’s of the world are rare.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33622989-the-curse-of-the-pharaohs)