The Greenland Party: A Mystery Story (Paperback)

I do believe that, in point of rigour, detective fiction is superior to mainstream fiction. All its elements - setting, plot, characters, etc. - need to strictly obey the rules of logic, and allow authors only to play a game of chess against themselves. Unlike mainstream fiction, where there's rarely enough narrative balance and coherence for a reader that wants more from a book than pure entertainment or intellectual headaches (see postmodernist writings, for instance). ;Tom East's recent whodunit - The Greenland Party - does justice to the genre, starting with the setting, Greenland, an exotic place for many of us, which gives the author the chance to mention in passing some of the most attractive sites and also provide information about the island; continuing with the suspenseful plot and counterplots, full of ingenious twists and turns; and ending with the characters - a more or less funny picture of the British (group of tourists), each with his/her own idiosyncrasies, as opposed to the harsh locals, both Greenland natives and Danish.;While most of today's detective novels place dialogue above everything else, East's novel manages to keep the balance, alternating it with descriptive passages (which I'd say are the hardest to write) that put meat on the bones of the book and thus make it more valuable, and, why not, cinematic. Also worth mentioning is the way in which the suspicion of murder moves, credibly, from one character to another, like in the best of classics. ;As I was reading it, The Greenland Party reminded me of Arnaldur Indridason's and Peter Hoeg's novels. What better company could one wish for?;PETRU IAMANDI on GOODREADS