The Opening Night Murders

By James Scott Byrnside

Group Comments:

I started off not liking it because I don’t like reading dialogue. And there is a lot of dialogue. But then I liked it, especially the summary part at the end.

The book put me to sleep the first time I tried to read it but I stuck with it. The summation at the end was good, but I just couldn’t get into the characters.

Hard to keep the characters straight.

I liked it. There were clues that the detectives knew that we didn’t. A bit on the dramatic/fantastic side.

I lost track of who was who. Very stilted. Didn’t get interesting until chapter 5. The slang was very jarring. I did really like the Walter character. Lots of red herrings–I liked that! Mostly a slog, but the ending was really good.

Quite possibly the worst book I’ve ever read.

I chose to read it like a noir which made the “stunted dialogue” make sense. I love sarcasm and deadpan humor and I thought there was a lot of this. I fell asleep reading it a number of times. There was SO much promiscuity, which seemed unnecessarily overt. And the overt racism was hard to read. Even though it might have been correct for the time, the author made a choice to use this to develop the time frame as realistic but he could have used other things instead.

A for effort, F for execution.