When a world famous genius millionaire suddenly disappears, everyone takes notice and the facts of his last known appearance get distorted. He was last seen walking his pet salamander leash (or without the leash as some others claim). As time goes on, more and more ridiculous rumors start flying around, rumors that lead to more questions: Has he gone into hiding? Has he been kidnapped? Has he lost his mind? Is he even alive or has he died? As Quinn, his friend, tries to track him down, he begins to think: How about all of the above?
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. While there is no rule that I have to review the book that I win, I am choosing to review this book and I'm gonna be honest about what I thought about this book as per my policy.Let me just start off by saying, this book was really weird. Either I didn't understand the point of this book or this book just shouldn't have been published.
I had a hard time following the story in this book. Not because it was complicated with a lot of moving pieces. It was because the story was boring. I honestly didn't care at all about any of the characters. I couldn’t relate to them as people given that they are all insane (more on that soon) but even all of the actions that they were taking made no sense (Serves me right for expecting insane people to behave rationally). I had so many questions about the things that they were doing: How are you paying for all these ridiculous things that you are doing? Aren't you breaking multiple laws and why hasn't anyone stopped you? Shouldn’t the police and/or other law enforcement be after you for all of the stupid things that you’ve done? The logistics of some things that went down made no sense to me. Also the characters in this book are nuts and I don’t mean that in a good way, I mean they are literally crazy. I felt like I was reading three different versions of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment but in the modern world. Everybody in this book was crazy. You can't even trust the narrator because he's crazy. Another thing that I hated about the narrator specifically was that his voice was really pompous and grandiose. It almost felt like the author was trying to prove how smart he is through the narrator. The pompousness of the narrator coupled with his craziness made me want to stop reading. It was a weird dynamic that I did not enjoy at all.
I entered the giveaway for this book thinking I would be reading a mystery involving the disappearance of an eccentric person, maybe the person had orchestrated their own disappearance for some reason (kind of like The Westing Game). I thought I would be able to read about coherent and smart characters trying to solve a mysterious disappearance. What I got instead was a serving of confusion and a loony bin. This book took one look at my expectations and ran in the opposite direction. It didn't even come close to meeting my expectations. I have no problem with the fact that my expectations weren't met. I have a problem with the fact that this book did not make any sense. There was nothing in this book that could qualify as rational.
The plot also bothered me because there was a lot of unnecessary "romance" just shoved in there for absolutely no reason. It made no sense. Why would any sane person- oh wait, it’s because all of them are insane. All jokes aside though, I put the word romance in quotes because it wasn't even romance, it was just emotionless and unnecessary adultery. Multiple counts of unnecessary adultery, which was the worst part, having to read about it more than once, even though one time would have been one too many. There were attempts to make it seem emotional with flowery language but it was so out of place and unwarranted that the metaphors were useless.
Speaking of metaphors, there were some really strange metaphors. Here's an example: "Most Americans at the time believed the disease of genius had been wiped out in this country. Now an outbreak of the affliction was flaring up. The CDC had been put on alert." Here's another one: The Virgin Mary was certainly surprised when the Angel Gabriel showed up to tell her she was carrying God’s child. But her shock couldn’t match the Institute’s when this sullen, underfed 17-year-old got off the plane." Usually metaphors are something that everyone or most everyone has experienced or can imagine. Who in their life has thought about notifying the CDC- oh wait… No but seriously, this book was published on March 1st 2020, which means that it was written and edited in 2019, so unless Richard Sanders is a time traveler who traveled to the future and came back, this metaphor is not relatable at all. Unfortunately for me these were not the only two weird metaphors in this book, I chose to spare you from the rest of them.
Overall this was a pretty terrible book. I’m going to give it 1 star. I know, some of you are probably shocked that it even gets a star, the reason for the one star is that I was able to read the whole book. The book was so bad but I wasn’t able to look away or stop. I kept reading with morbid fascination to see how much worse it could get. That is the only reason for that rating. I would not recommend this book to anyone at all. Do yourself a favor and stay extremely far away from this book.
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