#73

I wanted to like Giovanni's Gift, and really did for about a third of the way through, but Morrow's novel never lived up to the dark mysterious promise of its opening chapters, instead devolving into the literary fiction equivalent of a rather bland and predictable police procedural. In fact, a police procedural would have been less likely to overuse the painfully sentimental prose so evident here, and would have featured an engaging tough-guy or -gal as protagonist, instead of a shiftless egocentric non-entity.