RAVEN SISTERS
RAVEN SISTERS by GABI KRESLEHNER
PLOT: 3/5
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: 3/5
ENDING: 4/5
COVER ARTWORK: 4/5
READING EXPERIENCE: 3/5
OVERALL SCORE: 3/5
This is the second book in Kreslehner’s crime series about detective Franza Oberwieser after Rain Girl but, for me, it wasn’t as good as the first book in the series.
There is a good story here but it’s almost ruined by being confusing and overlong, with too many characters and too much rambling that seems like padding, which is maybe why the book seems too long. This is even stressed in the narrative itself: “This damned case was turning into a jumble of disparate threads that refused to be pulled together. Too many people in the frame, too many possibilities, too much obscurity”.
Chapters are narrated by several different characters in first person as well as Franza’s ongoing police investigation in third person; this also suffers in comparison to Rain Girl, as there was significantly more procedural detail in that first book than this one, where here there’s barely any.
There are some nice poetic touches in the prose and some fine descriptive passages, so it’s probably not a problem with the English translation from the German as I’d first thought but rather the curse of the second novel, a common affliction – in the music world it’s called second-album syndrome – where the writer has had years to hone the first novel and has to rush out the second to capitalise on the first.
Raven Sisters could have done with some heavy editing, in my opinion, and some of the subplots and characters removed as this would have created not just a shorter and tighter but also more focused book and this would have helped, as the investigation into the murder at the heart of the book is sprawling and covers a decades-long time period as well as a bewildering array of characters and potential suspects. Anything more than a handful of potential suspects tends to be too much and can be a sign of a lack of confidence in the story: let’s just throw suspects at the reader so they’ll never guess who the killer is!
There is also a lot of repetition in the prose and many words seems to have three or for synonyms where one or two would do: “Perhaps nothing. Perhaps zilch, nada, niente”, and, “He looked tense, restless, nervous” are just two examples. There were too many times while reading this book that I just thought, for god’s sakes, get on with it!
As usual, most of the male characters are horrible people – even the youngest cop on the team is a pervy lech with every woman he comes across! – but, then again, not many of the female characters are very likeable either.
Some of the suspense is well handled and some of the imagery, like Rain Girl, is very poetic and beautiful, which is a nice change for a crime novel, but I would have liked to see this balanced with more procedural detail.
Overall, I’m afraid I was disappointed with this outing for Franza but hopefully a more concise book in the series will follow next, as I like Franza’s embattled but determined detective and enjoy Kreslehner’s unique voice when it’s less rambling and more focused on telling the story.
