not for me

Hard 3. Definitely not my thing. Read as part of my attempt to read through a list of 50 mysteries that someone (who I am beginning to feel used a questionable rubric...) deemed essential.
I have read one "Barbara Vine" book before, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy. Was it good? No. Was it memorable? Yes. It was one of the sleaziest things I have ever read, and I've read Richard Laymon! It delighted in the taboo. <spoiler>The protagonist accidentally on purpose has sex with his brother in a bathhouse and the book ends.</spoiler> Needless to say, I expected something completely salacious and repellant.
I was wrong.
It was, honestly, kind of a snooze, and a little too genteel for me. But, she still managed to throw some taboo breaking in there. <spoiler>There's some pedophilia that is accepted as totally ok, and we are actually supposed to feel sympathetic to the grown man and antagonistic towards the boy</spoiler>
The main mystery was so... upper middle class skeletons in the family closet, full of thoroughly unlikable people. Like, they were almost all total jerks, selfish, narcissistic, cold-hearted, just gross.
The narrator is ok, but she is just that, narrator, spending the story on the periphery. It was a good plot device.
But yeah, I think that in the end, we are supposed to feel bad for one particular character, but to me it felt like a case if "you reap what you show."
If you like family melodrama, because <spoiler> the whole things revolves around who is a kid's mother, one sister or another. One never finds out for certain </spoiler> this could be a winner. If you are looking for a really good mystery, look elsewhere.

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