After the promising debut of the Bar Lume series with Game for Five, I was eager to read Three Card Monte by Marco Malvaldi.
Massimo and the four old-timers were back, but this was a standard mystery with a conventional structure, lacking the humour or the light touch of the first. Pretty disappointing.
Massimo is hired to cater a science convention at a local hotel. During the casual drinks, a Japanese computer scientist dies from an accidental fall - really, it's poison. Massimo is called by the police as a witness and begins to do his own investigating. There are quirky characters involved, but this novel lacks what made the first mystery unique. The old guys seem sidelined as they sit around the bar trying to understand the new WIFI, we meet side characters that end up going nowhere, and Massimo seems to lack the caustic humour that made me laugh out loud in the first book.
Like Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote (and as exciting), the mystery centers around Massimo, instead of his being an outsider. He knows more than the police, including hooking them up with his unlikely computer expert friends who seem out of place here. He helps the police with translations of the Japanese scientists interrogations and eventually solves the mystery. There are few clues for the readers to catch if they like, and when the culprit is unmasked, it's uneventful.
It was the sarcasm and quirky characters that made Game for Five a winner. I felt these were sidelined instead of presented in favour of a standard mystery death at a hotel, revolving around computers and science - it seemed out of place as a follow up. The structure was basic and moved along without surprises. I thought I was holding another hit, but surprisingly, found it not entertaining or memorable.
2008 / Tradeback / 168 pages
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