Lit Lawvers discussion

Can you commit the perfect crime?

Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn't exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder - and Pilgrim wrote the book.

What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.

I'm waiting for my copy from the library, but it looks like I should have it next week. I look forward to reading it, and hearing from you Becki.

In between bouts of shoveling feet of snow I finished the book this week. It's a great page-turning crime thriller. I hope many of you have been able to get a copy.

I'm going to have to speed read to get through this. The only way you can even remotely accept this story is to turn off your brain. It is so obvious to me that a 70-year old is writing this book. He has to keep reminding himself and us that he's 32, with the wisdom of a much older man. OMG. I hate it.

Clearly it's a genre thriller book, so you will need to accept some unbelievable aspects of the story. The coincidences between the main plot strands obviously stretch credibility.

I had to turn my book in at the library without finishing it, after an extension, but I can't say I will miss it. It does make more interested in novels about the Middle East, however. I just found the author to be too much of a know-it-all. It was also very obvious to me that he was not an American writer, not that it bothered me. I just knew that he was pretending at being American. There were ties of phrases that did not ring true to me. There is no 32 year-old In this country that could fit the archetype he's created. He did do his research, however, which is commendable.