Bruce Fergusson

Dear Bruce,
Thank you so much for acepting my friendship request here on Goodreads! I cannot wait to add your published works to my bookshelves.
Kind Regards
Lucinda ♥

Just finished The Last Policeman, by Ben Winters. A terrific premise--what would you do it the world was going to end in 6 months--provides this book with a fascinating backdrop. Winters has done some nifty imagining in that regard; unfortunately that's about all he's done here. It's not a story--at least not until the asteroid is a lot closer. The story he HAS given us--his detective hero's belief that an apparent suicide (lots of them pre-apocalypse)was actually a murder--is banal, boring, confusing and wouldn't make the cut even without the premise. We go back and forth and then--bam--the solution to the murder is summarized.
If you're going to have your policeman hero still keeping on with his duty, when evereone else is saying screw it, time for my bucket list, you have to invest some emotion into his pursuit of a killer. Make the victim a brother, a sister, a wife, whatever, and you're damn well going to get the killer before the world ends. Instead we get a guy who worked at an insurance company.
If that was Winters' point--that his hero will persist in investigating such an 'ordinary' case given the pre-apocalypse conditions--the result nonetheless is tedious reading without much emotionally at stake. The full backstory of his parents' deaths comes to late to help matters in that regard.
And if you're going to use a first person point of view, you have to have a narrator who at least has a distinctive voice, and detective Henry Palace doesn't, despite his occasional use of... 'holy moly'. His being a raw detecive still learning the ropes is no excuse for featuring a boring centerpiece narrator.
Moreover, Winters' attempts to connect the murder and event surrounding it with the coming catastrophe (and subsequent books in the trilogy)are awkward and unconvincing.
One nit-pick: several times the word "immanent" is used, incorrectly, for "imminent". Actually that's not a nitpick, not when an asteroid is heading toward Earth to destroy civilization.