What I Happen to Be Reading At the Moment
"A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.”
While not 13 anymore, the desire to read almost anything and everything in order to read for fun and for experience is still around. I'm currently working on my PhD in a physical science, but I love to read and books are one of my non-science hobbies.
The Midnight Choir is very similar in pacing to Gene Kerrigan's previous book in the trilogy, Little Criminals. There is a lot of exposition and setting up tension between characters (most often by those characters committing a crime) that ends up exploding in the last 50 pages or so. It's a very different way of writing a crime novel, and it makes it very suspenseful anticipating everything blowing up in the end. The Midnight Choir centers on a collection of criminals and garda, the Irish cops, over a relatively short time span. Within than time, we manage to learn more about the desperate and career criminals as well as maybe start to sympathize with some of them. The detectives as well have a tough road ahead, because unlike the nice clean TV crime dramas, cases are not quite so simple or go the way that the reader would hope, like plot focusing on a rape case where the accused uses his parents' wealth and influence to avoid being prosecuted. There are the classic good cops starting out that do not turn out to actually be all that good, and overall the multilayered portrayal of the characters involved makes the reader disgusted with everyone by the end. However, this is a good disgust from well drawn characters behaving like pigs but in a very human and believable way. So, the characterizations in this are spot on and excellent. A note about how this relates to Little Criminals: Some plot points in Little Criminals are referenced in The Midnight Choir, and there is some slight overlap in characters. While the two are not as closely related as a particular series detective would be, they are linked and it's probably best to read them in order unless the reader doesn't mind some minor spoilers.
