Book Review
Title: The Man With the Golden Mind (Detective Maier Mystery Book 2) by Tom Vater
Genre: Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Horror
Rating: 4.25 Stars
After reading The Cambodian Book of the Dead and enjoying it I was offered the chance to review the final book in the series which essentially forced me to read the whole series, which I am really bad at. This is the second book in the crime noir thriller series Tom Vater has written and I think the 4th or 5th book I have read by the author and he continues to surprise me at every turn. When I read The Cambodian Book of the Dead, it seems like a standalone to me and I felt it was very well written and a contained story so I didn’t know what to expect from The Man With the Golden Mind at all. We re-join Detective Maier as he heads into Asia after his last adventure in Cambodia after he is hired by a woman, Julia Rendel to investigate what happened to her father who was murdered 25 years before during the Vietnamese war.
Reading the synopsis I was intrigued about this new mystery that Detective Maier was going to be investigating and Vater opens the novel with a bang. Before Maier and Julia can even being their journey to Laos where they need to investigate, Julia is kidnapped right under Maier’s nose. Now Maier isn’t always the most observant man but given what happened to him in Cambodia you’d think he’d pay a little more attention. Even after arriving in Laos, Maier is immediately dragged into things that he doesn’t want to be involved in rather than investigating which is similar to the first book as he got dragged into a lot of stuff in Cambodia that he really didn’t have any business to investigate but did so anyway even when it was extremely dangerous for him and the people around him which made me dislike him a little as I felt he should have been focusing on the job at hand. Maier soon learns that his information is incomplete which also mirrors the first book and ends up digging into his missing client and looking for answers from the past.
While I did find The Man With the Golden Mind intriguing, Vater crafts some unique characters like Maier even though we hate him at times and he also manages to create with most vivid atmospheres and locations which might be from his own travelling experiences and made me want to hop on a plane more than once during my reading. One thing that is difficult at times is there are a lot of characters to keep track of and there are a lot of different events happening at the same time so these aren’t novels you can zone out while reading because you are going to get very confused very quickly. I did appreciate the fast pace of the novel so I was able to read it in a single sitting and I was surprised to see characters from the first novel make an appearance in this one and it is accompanied with a very unexpected plot twist that made me eager to see what the final book had in store for me.
Overall, The Man With the Golden Mind was an interesting sequel to The Cambodian Book of the Dead where Vater continues his talented writing especially in regards to atmosphere and the culture of the different countries he writes about both in the present and historically which made it a really unique read. Vater’s book aren’t easy books to read by any stretch of the imagination and I would highly recommend checking out the trigger warnings before hand as some of the content can get very dark. One thing Vater does excel in during this novel and in his other works are the unexpected plot twists that leave you genuinely baffled about where the book and series is going to go so I couldn’t wait to get stuck into The Monsoon Ghost Image as soon as I could.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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