Based on the TV show Death in Paradise the book is just like an episode the show and is written by the show's screenwriter. It had been a while since I had seen any Death in Paradise and I loved becoming reacquainted with Richard Poole and his team on the Caribbean island of Saint-Marie. This is part of a 4-book series and I will probably read the second one.

4 or 5 star review to follow ... ( )

This is a pretty good, fluffy murder mystery true to the show it's spinning off from. Unfortunately that means it's just an episode of Death in Paradise dragged out to 350 pages which leads to a lot of tedious summing up of the case and repeated word-for-word reproductions of everything written on the white board, adding nothing to the story other than bulk. If you're at all familiar with the formula of the show you'll probably know who the killer is almost immediately.

The editing is very sloppy as well, with a notable clanger being the character of Selwyn Patterson being referred to as "Selwyn Hamilton" early in the book then by his proper name when he finally shows up. This isn't a plot point, it's just an error that you'd think the creator of the show wouldn't have made.

The filler and poor editing go together to introduce a lot of repetitive language as well, with certain phrases ("Then can I ask you", "How do you mean?", "Mind you", "What's more") being over-used to an irritating and distracting degree. I was so annoyed by this by the midpoint that I started keeping a tally of the worst offender, "After all", which was used 15 times in the second half of the book. It's a phrase familiar from the show, but is usually heard just once in the final summing up; in the summing up of this story it's used, I believe, 6 times. This is just lazy writing.

All that being said, it's mostly an enjoyable read and true to the show. If you're like me or Richard Poole however you'll be driven to distraction by the nagging little problems that really should have been caught and perhaps would have been in a book that wasn't presumably seen as a guaranteed money spinner and spared the editorial attention it needed. ( )

In terms of whether the book or the TV series is better, I would say they are exactly the same. The writing is very straightforward, the characters are just like they are on TV (although was Camille messy, actually?), the plot was preposterous, and the humour is there. However, I found the story very repetitive; Richard kept thinking through the same issues over and over again, and the contents of the white board were reproduced regularly when a line or two was added to it.

Enjoyable but disappointing somehow - I thought the books might have more depth. ( )

von Daniel, spannend, etwas langatmig