Gave this up pretty quickly. I attempted the audio version, so perhaps it translates poorly in that format, but the style made the story entirely impossible to comprehend. I kept checking my ipod to see if it was skipping chapters because there seemed to be no coherent narrative. Just as I thought I had grasped whatever the protagonist was rattling on about, the focus and topic seemed to shift to something else. Perhaps some people find this sort of storytelling gymnastics compelling, but it felt like trying to carry on a conversation with someone suffering from profound dementia.

A thorough drawing and development of characters, but a little over written given an obsessive and unpromising love story about a private investigator and a gaoled woman who has murdered her cheating husband. It is good because it's written by Graham Swift who always delivers quality.

This is a story of a murder. The main character, George is an ex cop, private investigator, who was hired by Sarah to follow her husband who was having an affair with a refuge. I found the book to be painfully slow and repetitive. The author reveals the story slowly, as is a common, but really, it could have been a lot less pages and it really never goes anywhere. It is a story of one day, the two year anniversary, and is the stream of conscious of the detective, George. I don't feel anything for any of the characters. I really enjoyed his book, Waterland, but this one, not so much. ( )

Over the course of one day private detective George Webb thinks about his life--the things he has done, the things he has ongoing, his relationships. A disgraced former cop and current private detective, a divorced father of an adult daughter, a man in a relationship of sorts with a former client serving 10 years for murder. A murder he might have stopped had he known it would occur. He himself can't figure out if he should--or how he could--get out of this relationship that consists of visits every 2 weeks.

This book is a bit of a puzzle itself--as George recounts different parts of his past, the reader must fit them all together. The story is not linear, the story is one man thinking about different people and events at different times of his day.

I enjoyed this, though I am sure I missed a few things in trying to piece it all together. ( )

Minimal Music of the Mind, that's what this book presents you with. Incredibly precise portrait of the thoughts of private detective Webb, during a memorial day, with several flashbacks. The author succeeds in keeping this complicated structure clear enough to be followed by the reader. Whereas the form of this prose is fascinating, the content lacks tension and the plot is rather straightforward. ( )