I enjoyed the last Investigator Yashim book, and devoured this one in an afternoon in the Audubon wine bar at the Grand Hotel on Mackinaw Island. But my enthusiasm to get it finished actually worked against it, since I either missed the plot points coming together at the end of the book, or I was just reading so fast, having already decided that the book wasn't very well plotted out, that I missed something, and it wasn't till the last few pages that I realized that the book really did have a very good finish after all. I'm still of the mind that the plotting had some major flaws because I had a lot of trouble following what was happening at the end - some plot points resolved in improbable ways, which made it very unlikely that Yashim could have figured things out quite like he did. But I like the characters, I like the book, and I like the way Yashim always seems to sleep with the most beautiful woman in the book. For a eunuch, that just seems like a nice way for things to work out.
