While the "Villa of Boredom" reviewer already said a lot of the same things, much better than I could. The book was slow, the characters were bland, and some were moderately unlikeable. The so called hero seemed to be in the background of most of the book. Personally I found the "crazy" pathologist the truely likeable actual hero of the book, although she also seemed to take a back seat at times. I listened to the audio format, and the narrator's grating female impression also made things worse.