BrokenTune

I am so disappointed. 

This book had a fabulously strong start with gorgeous writing, an almost tangible atmosphere, and a tense protagonist, who seemed to be under a lot of pressure. 

In any case, he seemed to sweat a lot.

But once the plot started going, the story went downhill. Our protagonist developed into one of the tropes that I cannot stand - the romantic hero that seems dark and deep and mysterious, but has not reason at all for his idiotic behviour. 

But then, if our protagonist had told the police everything he knew instead of being obnoxious, and had behaved like a normal person who'd found a corpse, there would have been no story and the police would probably have caught the killer within 20 pages or so. It would have been uneventful, and we would have missed out on our protagonist chasing a young woman across the country, on the young woman being all mysterious and - quite understandably - trying to get away from out protagonist, and on the police using all sorts of disguises to track our protagonist instead to the killer...

I mean it was clear pretty early on that certain characters could not have been the killer, so there was a lot of hanging around daft plot developments to even find out what was what. And when the background was finally revealed, it was rather underwhelming. 

This story was so very much not what I am used to from Farjeon.

Unfortunately.