Review for "The Last Policeman" by Ben H. Winters (2013)
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
The premise of this book is indeed an appealing one: solving a murder in a crumbling world that’s only months away from certain annihilation from an asteroid called Maia. Harry Palace is a rookie cop who encounters a insurance agent’s body hanging in a McDonald’s, quickly dismissed by his peers as another suicide, as there’s plenty of those to go around these days. Palace, however, suspects something more. He begins investigating the man’s death as a murder, and digs up far more than he bargained for.
Perhaps I expected more chaos, more action…I don’t know. What I got here was a depressing, uncompelling narrator and a ho-hum story. We understand that Palace is driven to do the right thing in a world that could care less, but I found his character unconvincing, unmovable, and just plain boring. The plot is also terribly slow, as there wasn’t enough meat in this story to keep me satisfied in waiting until the end. Then I get to the end and there’s the answer to the mystery and that’s just kinda…it. Blah.
I loved the setting of this story, which I why I won’t go lower than 3 stars here. I just wish the character here was meatier, more interesting. General curiosity draws me to the other two books in this series (this is the first in a trilogy and I’m a sucker for apocalyptic fiction) but right now I think I’ll chill on this one.
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