Novel Tease

I was hugely disappointed by the direction this novel took after its prequel Altered Carbon was so successful. The first book is a 26th century mystery, and a well-done mystery, too; this one is short on mystery and long on death and dismemberment. The epilog sounds like the ending of an Agatha Christie story, where Poirot gathers everybody in the parlour to explain the whodunnit to those of us too dim to figure it out. Unfortunately, it wasn't that I didn't figure it out, but that I never realized we cared (and, it seemed, our protagonist Takeshi Kovacs didn't much care either).

I'll be reading the third book in the series, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.