I finished reading The Arraignment by Steve Martini. I'm not sure why I stuck with it.
The crime solver, Paul Madriani, tries to find out why his lawyer-friend Nick was killed.
The book has too main elements I can't stand in a novel:
1. Errors....the subject of "Key Man Insurance" comes up and the author paints it as life insurance that gets paid to the spouse or family of the employee. That's not the case. Key Man is for the employer of the dead guy. It's to help the company recover from the death of a key employee. The policyholder is the employer, not the insured. And the beneficiary is the employer, not the insured's family. The author could easily have left out the entire "Key Man" concept and just called it Life Insurance and it wouldn't have harmed that part of the story at all.
2. Too easy to resolve the crime by adding a bunch of new, heretofore unmentioned aspects at the end of the story. There is mention of an "item" throughout the book that seems to be key to the solution of the crime. But at the end of the book, when the crime solver is finding out what happened, there is page after page of new information that the reader is expected to digest in order to understand how the crime happened.
I think it's much better when all the information concerning the crime is scattered throughout the book and at the end you have the thrill of learning how it all tied together.
But maybe this author isn't up to that. I see from some of the Amazon.com reviews that I'm not the only one who thought this was a forgettable book. But many seem to think this author has written and can write better stuff. I'm not sure if I'll ever find out myself.
8:04:21 AM 
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