Rating: WARTY!
Not to be confused with Agatha Christie's The Seven Dials Mystery, this novel is named after a location in Covent Garden, London, where seven streets converge. It's the twenty-third in the Pitt detective series by Anne Perry, aka Juliet Marion Hulme, who served five years starting in 1954, when when she was fifteen, for helping her friend Pauline Parker brutally murder Parker's mother. A Murder mystery written by someone who has actually murdered! I didn't realize this when I started reading (or actually, listening to) this novel. I mistakenly thought that this author was the one who wrote The Accidental Tourist, but of course that was Anne Tyler! Oops!
As it happened, the novel really wasn't very good. I only made it to the half way point, and that was by skimming and skipping about sixty percent of the first half. I started listening with interest. I thought the crime was a good one to investigate, but this novel took so many digressions and rambling asides into pointless drivel that I tired of it very quickly. It didn't help that reader Michael Page, while doing fine with male voices, sounded like a Monty Python sketch when he tried impersonating cantankerous dowager aunts.
One of the worst failures is that an obvious possibility for a murder motive was completely ignored. Obviously I don't know if that turned out to be the actual motive, but it seemed to me that there were two options here, and neither was voiced, not in the portion to which I listened anyway. The first of these is that the victim was lured there deliberately by a third (or actually, a fourth in this case!) party for the express purpose of murdering him. The second possibility was that the victim was actually 'collateral damage' from an attempt by the fourth party to murder the third. The fact that this detective never even considered these possibilities made him look inept at best, and like a moron at worst.
Almost as off-putting: the detective's boss was a complete caricature, and all of his scenes with the main character were nauseatingly bad. The reader's tone may have contributed to how bad these were, I have to add. That's one of several problems with audio books - you get their take on it, not your own! And what's with the whiny violin music at the start of these disks? When you opened the original print novel, did violins spew forth? I seriously doubt it, so where are the heads of these audio book morons at, that they feel compelled to add music? Get a life you guys!
This novel takes place - as far as I can gather, during or after 1883, by which time the use of fingerprints had already appeared in an 1883 novel (by Mark Twain), yet never once is the consideration of using fingerprinting raised in order to see who had handled the gun used in the murder. So, along with other problems I had with it, this novel was sad and I am not interested in reading any more by this author. I cannot recommend this one.
