Book Review: In Cold Blood

A sorry side-effect of my month's hiatus is that I'm behind with my book reviews - this was the book club book of the month for September, and I've already finished October's, so this will be a very brief review.

Basically, I found this hard going. I know, I know, it's a classic, people still visit the farm, yadda, yadda, but even though it's a true-life story and the first "journalistic" novel of its kind, and exceedingly well written, I still plodded through it thinking "so what?" for much of the time. It wasn't so long ago that I would have given up around one-third of the way through. When it's the book club choice though, I feel I should give it a better chance. It wasn't worth it. A well documented and researched exposé of a senseless, virtually motiveless, crime is still a book about people in whom I have no interest and no point of reference. I wouldn't have chosen to spend time in their company and I would have preferred not to know the things I now know about them.

To cap it all, since the end is known from the beginning, and although Capote does a technically excellent job of keeping the nugget of truth from the reader until the last possible moment, I found the ersatz suspense tiresome and, when it was uncovered, the nugget to be one of fool's gold.