This is a very heavy book. Oh, it's not that it deals with serious things seriously or anything like that, it's just a weight like being thrown into the sea tied to a millstone, a darkness unrelieved by anything more than a mildly clever turn of phrase. Some putatively charming sociopaths who think they're master criminals, except the only way they can think of to take what they want is to kill the people who have it. It's based on real people and events, because there are and have always been people like that, and I guess there's some value in telling some version of that story, but this is most of 375 pages in the first-person mind of one or another of the family of sociopaths at the novel's center, and after a while you just want it to end, you end up hoping they all die. (They don't, because there's no documentation.) Not a fun read, not a great novel.
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