Book Review: Mortom, by Erik Therme

I was disappointed with this Mortom, by Erik Therme. The set up is definitely interesting: Andy inherits an estate from estranged cousin Craig and goes to look at the property with sister Kate. Upon entering the house, the siblings find a dead rat, which is the first clue in a puzzle that begins to consume Andy.

My main problem with this book was the character Andy. He was a complete asshole. And not the likeable kind of asshole that's fun to read about, even if you wouldn’t want to meet them in real life. He was the entitled whiny kind - nothing is ever really his fault, everyone is so much less intelligent than him and only gets in his way, etc. Like a sociopath without the charm that keeps sociopaths interesting. Now, I know that he was supposed to be an asshole, and (no spoilers) the ending does make up for this a little, but it was still rough following around a character for 275 pages and just wanting to punch him in the face the entire time. For me, this was detrimental: I never really became invested in the story, because I was never pulling for Andy to win. Even when the reader gets a glimpse of his tragic backstory, it didn’t change my opinion of him and his actions. I just thought to myself, “Yeah, he probably deserved all that.” That reveal was supposed to give him a somewhat-human dimension, but I was just glad that he had suffered. Andy also had absolutely no development - he was the same person at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. Really, pretty much all of the characters were.

Don't worry rat, I'll protect you

The actual writing was mixed. The narrative parts of the story were good, and the book is definitely a page-turner in sections. The dialogue, on the other hand, often sounded forced, and the tags and adverbs jarred with the smoother prose of the descriptions. The POV also jumped around a lot in the beginning (within chapters/sections), which was off-putting.

The clues were also a little disappointing. While there were a couple that were quite clever, a lot were “here’s a key, find out what it’s to.” There is some talent in figuring that out, but I guess the puzzles weren’t puzzle-ly enough for me. Craig's game was very convoluted and depended heavily on a lot of assumptions about how people would act after his death, but not outright unrealistic. I actually think that the game would have worked better played in reverse - with Craig's explanation in the beginning to set the tone of the book. I think that also could have jumpstarted some character development in Andy too. Of course, much of the final mystery would then be lost, so I guess it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Of course, it's been getting excellent reviews on Amazon, so maybe I'm crazy.

I would recommend this book to people who want a quick, light mystery and who care about plot more than characters.