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Well, I for one was really disappointed in the book. Not in the sense that I had ever read Chandler and was let down that way, because I had not. I was disappointed because I had heard good things about the author not only here, but other sites as well. My main complaints with the book:
1.It seemed to me to be disjointed and all over the place. I know everything eventually came back to Lennox/Marston, but it took it's sweet time getting there and took a lot of twists and turns along the way. By the time of the big reveal, I didn't care that Lennox/Marston was still alive. I just wanted the damn book to be over with. Heck, I would have been happy with it ending after the murder and the suicide of the writer and his wife.
2.I didn't care for a single character in the book, outside of Marlowe. Now, maybe that was the only person I was meant to care about, but it still kept me from really connecting with the material. I guess in the end maybe I didn't care about Marlowe that much, either, because I had a hard time motivating myself to pick up the book and continue reading. A book of this size usually takes me about 2-3 days to get through, this one took me 14 days. I just didn't have any urgency to go forward with the story more than an hour or so at a time. I think not connecting with any of the characters and the story being all over the place and not really feeling cohesive were big contributing factors to this.
In the end, I can't give this book any more than *1/2 or ** out of ****. I just found it a tedious, arduous task to even finish the book. At several points I wanted to quit, but I kept with it for two reasons: to see if it got better, and so I could discuss it here.
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