Sounds like Palahniuk maybe bit off more than he could chew for this ambitious endeavor, described by L.A. Times reviewer Jonathan Shapiro as “part-noir mystery, part-historical fiction”. Shapiro starts the review by praising Palahniuk’s talent, as epitomized in the novel Fight Club and then proceeds to tear apart the new novel, calling it “a bomb” and “A giant gasbag of a book, an unwieldy genre mish-mash, more confusing than entertaining, it lands with a thud as what the cigar-chompers in Hollywood used to call a “feathered fish” — a story with so many disparate parts that it neither flies nor swims.”

Read the review:

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book27-20100527,0,4204498.story?track=rss

-submitted by staffer Shannon Wertzberger