Sunday, September 18, 2011

"The Murder Room" by Michael Capuzzo

To my unfortunate dismay, I was never able to finish my reading of this book.  It was the last audiobook I entertained in conjunction with my employment as a driver for a book van.  I ventured out onto my route one week, listened to half of it, and then was summarily fired before the second week could begin.

To the best of my knowledge, the book still lies on the floor of the book van I drove.

It is somewhat of a loss, never finishing what promised to be not merely an intriguing concept, but also a fascinating read.  'The heirs of Sherlock Holmes...'  Who couldn't be intrigued by such a title?  At least that is what caught my eye.  Who were the heirs of Sherlock Holmes?  What would draw them together into one crime-deducing unit?  What would the ultimate unsolvable crime be to draw upon their combined talents?

I waited in expectation, but none of these questions were ever answered for me.  There was no one unsolvable crime.  There was a collection of law-enforcement individuals, sleuths, detectives, and anyone involved stopping crime.  How they worked together was somewhat of a mystery to me, or if they did at all.  Was this club of theirs merely for the social needs of camaraderie?

I believe my initial expectations for the story were misguided. 

This book revolved mainly around three character: Frank Bender (a sex-crazed psychiartists who created busts of the people he viewed as responsible for crimes), Richard Walters, an ill-mannered criminal psychiatrist who was more in tune with the deduction methods of Holmes than any of them, and William Fleisher, who seemingly possessed no unusual characteristics.  His role was of the atypical police detective, pounding out the crime scene in standard police crime scene investigation style.

The book primarily follows these three.  We see some of their history.  We learn a bit of how they were drawn into the world of solving heinous crimes.  And there are various crimes we are able to follow them through as they bring the perpetrators to justice.

I enjoyed these characters.  I can't say I saw much of them as t heirs of Sherlock Holmes.   The deductions he was famous for, they play a role here, but not the dominant role one saw with Holmes.  Nevertheless, how these three solve crimes is quite engaging.

Only making it halfway through the book, I should refrain from judging the plot based upon only what I managed to read.  To the point I reached, I was confused as to what the plot was.  If it was merely a means to tell the various cases these three solved, there was no moving from one case, to the next, to the next.  The stories of these crimes seemed to bleed through to other crimes - and even into other characters.

My hope for a grand crime that would require the combined deductive talents of this 'heirs of Sherlock Holmes' group, the Vidocq Society, it neither seemed to manifest itself.  One grand crime to direct the narrative through all these myriad of other crimes, halfway through the book, I never detected.  So the theme of what this book was, I find it impossible to state. The three main characters were engaging; but this lack of direction to the plot, left me confused.  I would like to have finished the book, so as to learn what became of these three men, and maybe at some future point I shall, but with the absent of a discernible plot, other books are available that will monopolize

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