I picked this book up after learning this author wrote the short story that inspired the movie, It Happened One Night. I really like that movie, but the story Night Bus wasn't readily available. This book was in the public domain, so I was ready for a mystery. There will be spoilers in this review.
It starts off with a shipwreck. A man is mysteriously murdered, and a juggler comes under suspicion. More deaths follow, and the murderer may not be as straightforward. There's also some romance nonsense in there.
Here come the spoilers:
So I didn't look into this ahead of time, but I thought it was a mystery. Technically, I suppose it is. But as I was reading, it transformed from an engaging mystery to The Giant Claw. From out of nowhere, a Pteranodon is suddenly a character. I was hoping a human explanation would be the eventual explanation, but no. In the end, it really was a prehistoric dinosaur responsible for most of the deaths.
I had a real issue that bothered me. Why was this dinosaur just murdering people? Doesn't it need to eat? It killed a sheep, but it didn't take it to eat or anything. The explanation of where it came from was weird, but I just couldn't get past the whole "why isn't it eating anything?". There were just corpses everywhere.
Anyway, I was bummed with this one. The romances were strange, and the dinosaur murderer was weird. Even when they had a human murderer, he walked on his hands and that looked like bird tracks? Okay, sure. This book was disappointing, and I think it should be left to the dogfishes (a reference to a moment in the book).
No comments:
Post a Comment