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Vic Varallo Mystery #8
A Dream Apart
The plot is based on the characters of Vic Varallo and Delia Riordan.
- GenresMystery
175 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 5, 2017
Leave it to Beaver meets Hawaii 5-0. Terrible mix. Painful to get through. Isn't the point of a mystery novel to let the reader participate in who they think did the crime? To leave little Easter eggs and clues to help the reader piece it all together? Well Egan just throws in a new character at the end who wasn't even in the novel (after introducing myriads of trite one dimensional characters. Just bad, bad technique.
March 4, 2019
First female detective on the squad in 1978 makes her father super proud he taught her so well and inspires her boss to approvingly say "Good girl".
The only problem is that the case she solves, oh wait no she didn't...the case where she proves somebody is innocent even though nobody seems to care if she was guilty or not but the somebody herself...that case starts with something so unbelievably obvious being considered unsolvable. Now of course the unbelievably obvious in a mystery novel isn't likely to be what happened, but if they had considered the unbelievably obvious suspect to be guilty at least there would have been some drama and perhaps some real achievement at the end more satisfying than tying up a loose end.
As it was, you just travel through a month on the team as other murders, heists, attempted murders, heists, burglaries and heists, heists and burglaries (most popular word in the book is heist, fyi) and a moon inspired vandalism, come, get investigated and solved in various ways and as you would expect in real life, in different orders than they happened. And in the dreary legwork that makes up their normal routine you feel a gritty reality that just makes you wonder all the more how they all have such a blindspot on the central case that the story is supposedly about yet only gets 10% of the book's attention.
Ugh, whatever. Avoid, you're welcome.
The only problem is that the case she solves, oh wait no she didn't...the case where she proves somebody is innocent even though nobody seems to care if she was guilty or not but the somebody herself...that case starts with something so unbelievably obvious being considered unsolvable. Now of course the unbelievably obvious in a mystery novel isn't likely to be what happened, but if they had considered the unbelievably obvious suspect to be guilty at least there would have been some drama and perhaps some real achievement at the end more satisfying than tying up a loose end.
As it was, you just travel through a month on the team as other murders, heists, attempted murders, heists, burglaries and heists, heists and burglaries (most popular word in the book is heist, fyi) and a moon inspired vandalism, come, get investigated and solved in various ways and as you would expect in real life, in different orders than they happened. And in the dreary legwork that makes up their normal routine you feel a gritty reality that just makes you wonder all the more how they all have such a blindspot on the central case that the story is supposedly about yet only gets 10% of the book's attention.
Ugh, whatever. Avoid, you're welcome.
October 30, 2019
The cover fooled me. I thought it might be a mystery with a metaphysical twist. It wasn't. Later, I found out the author was a John Bircher back in the day, so I felt better about really disliking the book and its pedestrian sentences. I would be interested in reading a biography of the author, just because of her unusual place in the genre and some oddities in her Wiki bio. And because of all those author photos with her cat.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews