Der Schlange List

Ein schießwütiger Gast in einem Nobelrestaurant sorgt nicht gerade für gute Kritiken. Detektive Peter Decker bekommt den Fall auf den Tisch und braucht nach dem Killer nicht lange zu suchen. Doch was war sein Motiv? Da sich der Killer selbst noch am Tatort erschossen hat, steht Peter vor einem Rätsel.

Aber anstatt den Fall einfach zu den abgeschlossenen Akten zu legen, beschäftigt er sich weiter mit dem Selbstmörder und Freunde hatte er scheinbar keine und beliebt war er auch nicht. Peter macht sich damit weder in seiner Familie Freunde noch unterstützt ihn sein Chef bei seiner Recherche! Doch wer Peter kennt, weiß, das es weiter geht!

Wieder habe ich die Originalausgabe gelesen "The Serpent's Tooth"

The crime is solved from the very start. While different guests are dining at pricey Estelle’s in Los Angeles, a man with a green jacket enters mostly unnoticed. That is, until the shooting starts. In the end, many of the diners are dead, and so is the man with the green jacket, gun close to his hand. Everything is solved? Well, there are some lose ends. A job to be done by LAPD Lieutenant Peter Decker and his team.

This case where everything seemed obvious took some good 60 pages to captivate me – well, it would have been way more, had I not read the text on the inner cover sleeve. Why the heck is it that some publishers have it to try and ruin it with this weird thing of going for a better pitch that just gives away too much? Anyway, this is a police procedural, so it is pretty OBVIOUS there is more to the killing – I just wish that where you are as a reader after the first quarter of the book would not have been spoiled on the book’s cover.

This is REALLY police procedural with emphasis on procedural. You wonder if anything is ever going to happen when actually you know who committed which crime from the beginning and what is really behind it from the cover summary (or from after the first quarter of pages). So, yes, it is probably realistic in as far as investigations might be dull – but is also is dull to read, at least some of the pages. Then, when it gets you to fast-turn the pages, it is also a bit of a far-fetched plot – that dual setup and the whole of the Decker’s involved etc.

There are references to the book before this – without explaining, so this cannot really be understood without having read book number 9, “Prayers for the Dead“ – not needed for the solution of this case, but still mentioned more than once. Oh, yes, and the exlamation marks. I read that in some other review and thus could not help seeing them. Faye Kellerman is big in exclamation marks and italics eg. page 202 But she is also big with a certain humor like when talking about preferring to be a cop rather than with the Feds: ‘...I really want to solve crimes, not wear sunglasses.‘ p 119

So does that make up for it? Not completely – I do not like having to go halfway through a book before it gets to me and then, what gets to me is a bit too much, and a large bit of it.
3 stars.