At the time I read Pavesi's first book (Eight Detectives) I really enjoyed it. I recently reread in anticipation of this book and I found it much more lacking than I remembered. Still, I went into Ink Ribbon Red with excited optimism. Unfortunately, the whole thing fell a bit flat.
This is a very hard book to get into. The premise is that a bunch of old university friends are at a house for a weekend together. During this trip, they play a game where they write stories about murdering each other. This is alluded to by the blurb but isn't made clear in the book until a good 30-40% of the way through. Meanwhile, you have a narrative which is jumping around wildly because it turns out that some of what you're reading is the stories written by the characters. This is a great idea in theory but without being set-up properly in the book itself, it creates a horrible mess for a first-time reader. It also means you have to pay really close attention to the times/dates at the start of each section which I find tiresome. I find I can ignore these in most books without any confusion so it's a pity the writing was not clear enough here.
In terms of the content of the book, I found the characters diverse and interesting enough. I wasn't particularly invested in the story, partially because of the issues mentioned above and partially because there wasn't much to work out aside from the content of the stories. Ultimately I think this book had a great idea but it wasn't executed to its full potential. I like the creativity behind it but it definitely needed to be refined a bit more in order to create a better reading experience
Overall Rating:
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