Shut your eyes tight

An overreaching, overwritten, disappointing followup to Verdon's whiz-bang debut. A sense of repetition - the kind of “I feel like I've read this exact same line earlier in this story” repetition (and in fact I was able to pinpoint a couple of short paragraphs that the writer plagiarized from himself) - and kitchen sink writing detracted from what could have been another very engaging “locked room” mystery. The influence of the extreme popularity of international mafia crime thrillers (e.g. [b:The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest 6892870 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium, #3) Stieg Larsson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1291169064s/6892870.jpg 12883496]) adds to the sprawl of this already overlong work, and just seemed nonsensical to me. Scenes and scenes adding nothing to the overall arch of the story, including lectures in police academy, flirtations with young attractive officers, and far too much detail of our protagonist's failing marriage; all of these left me wondering what purpose these throwaways might have had in the mind of the author and editor.Of course, I'm not sure anything that starts out with a completely baffling comparison between a fall morning and a submarine would have been able to score any higher marks with me.