Let me be clear right off the bat, I was unaware that this is the 15th book in an already established series. However, this series is akin to Nancy Drew, in that you do not necessarily need to read the books in order but it does enhance the reading experience if you do. By the time I realized this, I was too far in to DNF the book. I will try my best not to let this fact affect my review, so we’ll see how this goes. 

     Honestly, the beginning of this book is such a mess and is not very focused on any one thread. By the end, I understand why the beginning is formatted the way it is, but when you are reading it, it can be a little disjointed and jarring. That being said, once the mystery was established, I did care enough to continue reading and find out what happened. It was an interesting concept, to begin with, but I think it could have been executed a little bit better for sure. 

     While the mystery became intriguing toward the end, it did not seem to have one common focal point throughout the mystery. There was a missing teacher, then a potentially corrupt police officer, then a new weird teacher that maybe had an inappropriate relationship with his students, then a missing student. It just felt like none of these items were connected and I was getting whiplash from how often we were changing focus. I understand that this concept can be done well, I just feel like Peter Lovesey failed to execute the formula that so many other mysteries and thrillers excelled with. 

     I think one of the biggest issues I had with this book is that I just did not care about any of the characters. While this may be a symptom of the fact that this is the 15th book featuring Detective Peter Diamond, I just felt like I didn’t know too much about Peter and therefore had a hard time connecting with him and caring about him. Aside from Peter though, none of the characters felt too developed and the author did not give me a real reason to care about any of them. This is not a bias toward the other books in the series either, as even the new characters were not established well and were just more irritating than anything. I found the high school students to be shallow and boy crazy, which is not necessarily a bad thing as long as they have some other redeeming qualities, which these girls did not. 

     Now we all know how I feel about pacing in books, and let me tell you, this book was SLOW! 384 pages felt longer than Kingdom of Ash and it was all due to the slow pacing. It felt like a lot of build-up and establishing this situation for it all to wrap up extremely quickly. This could also be due to the lack of focus on the mystery in this book that there were so many different plotlines to establish. It felt like this mystery should have been split between two different books and then maybe the excessive build-up would have been justified. 

    Overall, I’m not sure how this book compares to the other books in the series, but I was just not impressed with this book as a whole. It definitely had its moments, which is what stopped me from giving it 1 star, but it just did not hold up to some of the other books I have read recently. I have just been reading some pretty great books this year, and this is one that I was not overly impressed with. 2/5 stars to Down Among the Dead Men by Peter Lovesey.