Wycliffe And The Cycle Of Death

Rating:
Summary: A potentially fantastic book ruined by lack of an ending
Review: This book begins brightly enough as a well-written murder mystery. As the book progresses, more and more is unveiled and more and more possibilities enter the mind. So, of course, the reader wonders what the solution will be, and eagerly awaits discovering it. "How is the author going to pick a murderer out of all this" I thought. He doesn't. The book is closed on a sort of "and we'll never know who it was" situation that ranks up there with "and it was all a dream" for end of book cop-outs. So, this book does keep you guessing until the last page, in fact, it keeps you guessing forever! Surely the whole point of a murder mystery is to wrap everything up cleverly and explain.

Here, the author WJ Burley clearly digs himself into too big a hole to get out of and has to wrap it up by saying "the police will accept that the murderer is the man who committed suicide, as dead people can't be tried, even though they don't believe it is"; hence accepting the obvious theory at the beginning of the book which the whole rest of the book was meant to counteract: he might as well have wrapped it up after 60 pages when everyone thought that was the solution already. To illustrate this point, read the blurb on the back of the book: "the murderer's identity seems obvious, but Wycliffe is not convinced". Yet it is wrapped up accepting the obvious identity!

This book is not so much a bad book as one of the most dissatisfying I have ever read. I have not read the rest of the Wycliffe series, but if they are all wrapped up in this kind of way, then I have no idea how this author has enough money to go on! Imagine what the outcry would have been if Agatha Christie had resolved a book with "we'll never know who it was". I highly dis-recommend this book, unfortunately, unless you want a murder mystery without a solution. 2 stars.