Fate’s Intervention

There ought to be a prize for anyone who can make sense of this story. For all but the last of the forty-one chapters, Fate’s Intervention reads like a straightforward, multi-murder mystery. The forty-first chapter, however, changes everything, with a bizarre, black-becomes-white switch. Presumably this is fate’s intervention but, whatever it is, it left this reader utterly bewildered. Setting this absurdity aside, the story details the aftermath of a young man’s break-up with his fiancée — his attempt to jump off a bridge; the stalker-like poems he leaves for her; the cyber bullying he suffers after his failed suicide; and three dead bodies, one found below the same bridge, another with its head bashed in, and a third asphyxiated. The material is here for an intriguing story, but the plot unfolds so slowly and so transparently that all suspense is lost. The writing, too, is pedestrian, with several grammatical whoppers – infer instead of imply, for example – and the dialogue is similarly stilted, the exchanges between the two beat cops, central characters in the drama, much too formal for typical squad-room banter. From almost every perspective, this is not a novel worth a place on any mystery fan’s reading list.