"After the First Death" was one of those slow starters that gradually picked up steam and finished with a flourish. That's a dangerous game to play with me, because I have little patience. Sure there was a naked woman with her neck slashed in the bed of the guy buy page 6, but then there was a lot of introspection. I don't like introspection. Not sure why. I'll have to think about it.
It was written in 1969 and then another author wrote a book by the same name ten years later. Seems like something you'd want to check before you gave your book a title. But I guess they didn't have Google back then.
Lawrence Block weaves his spell in this suspenseful tale of a man haunted by murders he hopes he hasn?t committed ... It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why? before the police do.I gave it a 6-plus of 10 on the Haugenomter. Not great, but good. Amazonians and Goodreaders gave it a 3.5 of 5.
After a 182 pages of grittiness, Block ended the book with some thoughtful prose:
"Nothing is ever certain. We do not know quite where we are going. But where you are going is less important, I think, than where you are. And still less important is where you have been."
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