The Final Cut

This is a rollicking fun and quick read if you suspend some disbelief.

Nicholas Drummond of New Scotland Yard is shocked when his friend, Inspector Elaine York, is murdered in New York while on duty escorting and guarding Britain's Crown Jewels, on loan to the Metropolitan Museum. He flies to America and is soon embroiled in a plot to steal the biggest diamond of them all, the enigmatic and supposedly cursed Koh-i-Noor diamond. Along with Michaela Caine of the FBI, the duo hunt down an evasive art thief without realising how thick the plot really is.

This book is basically like an episode of CSI - it's quick, it's fun, and it invites you to switch off your brain and roll with whatever they throw at you. Plot-wise, I managed to guess some of the big reveals (thanks to years of reading Agatha Christie and being overly suspicious of everything), like when the Koh-i-Noor that Drummond and Caine saw right at the beginning which they thought was a replacement replica was the real one, and that Victoria Browning was sus - I somehow called of that early, and some plot developments didn't make sense or was a little convenient for me, but overall I was still nevertheless engaged to keep on reading. The chapters were sufficiently short and tumbled on to each other so you never could find a good place to stop.

The characters were a little cliched but they weren't annoying or obnoxious. Nicholas being the grandson of a baron or something kinda reminded me of those "Romancing the Rake" romance novels where the male lead always has to be related to the aristocracy in some way, and he was just as physically perfect too, being frequently referred to as “James Bond” by Caine. Michaela, or Mike, was OK as well, but we don't really quite know much about her to be super attached to her.

Ironically, the character I enjoyed the most was Kitsune, the Fox, the jewel thief. We seem to actually spend more time getting to know her and her backstory than we do with our two main leads. I also wish that we had known more about her motivations and why she became a thief in the first place. We only know that she was a bit of a kleptomaniac when she was a kid, but it doesn't quite follow through that she would then choose to spend the rest of her life a professional burglar. Although we get to know her more than the two main leads, I still felt like I wanted her fleshed out even more.

I felt like the story dragged a little bit around the middle sections, when the two main leads are chasing Kitsune around, from the time when she stole the Koh-i-Noor all the way until we found Anatoly dead and when our main leads eventually land up in Geneva, but it wasn't intolerable and still much easier to wade through than a lot of other books. I was particularly disappointed when, in Ch 88, Elaine's video to Nicholas appeared so conveniently out of nowhere, just at the crucial moment. It was very very convenient. And then we find out that Kitsune had done something so completely out of character as to get drunk and tell Elaine about the legend of the 3 stones, which in turn helped Nicholas and Mike to find out about it, which they otherwise could never have guessed. Honestly this pulled the ending down a little for me, I didn't like how convenient it was. The ending was also not very surprising and didn't pull any huge twists that shocked me. I was getting a little worried that the Koh-i-Noor diamond would really turn out to have some magical properties but it turns out that it doesn't? Or does it, since Lanighan's cancer was cured? I don't know... I would be a little miffed if the magic came through in later books. I'm a huge fan of fantasy but I don't like it so randomly shoehorned into what is otherwise a completely non-fantasy story for a little pizzazz.

Tl;dr this was a mindless read that is more enjoyable than many of its kind out there. As long as you don't go in expecting a super-sophisticated or complex mystery, you might get a lot of entertainment out of this.