Sitting on a beach reading this and broiling slowly in the heat, made me feel like I had got off the plane and had wandered into the world of The Matrix, where I was being fed on junk-food and drivel. I almost began to weep at some point as it dawned on me that I had been had. It had all started off so promisingly and I thought it was going to be great. It all started off so well, with the brain in a wheelchair an interesting variation on the usual stuff, and the lists of evidence seemed to promise an intricate jig-saw for the genius Rhyme to put together. But then. But then.. I almost wept out of a sense of futility as the author ruined what promised to be a good book. The whole thing began to get bloated, as the drip, drip, of saccharine American sentiment and PC orthodoxy began to gather around the characters, in a world run exclusively by brilliant thin people. Then the whole subtext of the feminist agenda began to grate. Rhyme is the symbol of crippled American masculine virtue and the super-competent females are left to deal with their own litany of weak men, perps and bad cops. These women can do anything - shoot straight, read minds and even resist desserts. The men are mostly physical or moral cripples. The marker for virtue in the book is whether someone eats well and works out - the author might take his own moral system on board and get his next book down the gym and lose a few pounds. He might want to read Double Indemnity, to find out the benefits of a good diet. The guy can obviously write and the fact that he can do so, makes this clunker, almost unforgivable. So out of the thousands of books I could have picked to take on holiday, I felt I had picked the wrong one. There are a few corpses strewn about the book but the only death I was left to really mourn, was my own brain.