Laura

⚖The case for it

Five parts and five first-person accounts, and readers say the achievement is that each voice is genuinely a different person on the page. Waldo Lydecker opens, vain and cruel and much better company than any detective, before McPherson takes over in plain cop diction. Caspary’s real subject is men who try to possess a woman through her apartment, her likeness and the gossip around her. Caspary took the structure from Wilkie Collins. Readers call it “one of the finest and most unusual mystery novels ever written.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Waldo’s opening section is affected and padded with fussy invented footnotes, and readers who cannot stomach him rarely recover. The narrator switches lose people, particularly around the police-statement section. The suspect pool is small enough that a fair number work it out early. McPherson’s fixation on a dead woman’s wardrobe and rooms reads as ghoulish rather than investigative to some. And readers who arrived expecting hardboiled noir find a “sort of Domestic/Romantic Suspense hybrid” instead, with one calling it “very dull for the title of a crime novel.”

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings