‘The Deadly Violin: Five Detectives Quest’: Book Review
Fine debut, certainly not great
Never, ever, treat a debut like a normal piece. Treat it as a start: look at the writer’s pros and cons, style, and just how he does it. Review it as if you’re a competition judge, though you’re not. Because a debut never expects a wide scope of scholarly criticism. So I did that with The Deadly Violin: Five Detectives Quest, a novel by newcomer Andy M. Baramuli, found while scouring through the old shelves. Sadly, in this case, nothing works.
No reviews of this novel are complete without mentioning its style. Sadly, there are no perfect words to describe its style. It feels like Baramuli is making a debut story — not a debut novel — and sprinkling masterclass elements. When I tried doing my first novel (it was gone after… an error), I would place excessive descriptions of various things, like showering, walking to the kitchen, etc. The Deadly Violin is littered with significant-looking chunks of paragraphs stating simple things like drinking coffee and walking out of Charles de Gaulle Airport, all of which have no big impact on the story and is just a filler that merely needs to be said, not specifically described.
This is slightly saved by the decent storytelling mood Baramuli brings to this promising story, though part of it makes the novel sound like a bedtime story, though it didn’t yawn me.
While Baramuli is obviously ambitious on character development (he even made an entire biodata of every character stated in the novel), the final result lacks that scope. At times the novel quickly introduces the character then invents an incident for them, when I haven’t even got a grasp of how they are. It’s disappointing, because, as I said, the novel has lots of potentials to be better. I don’t have much heart for the characters, thus to the plot, and so throughout the novel, I consistently think, “What are they doing?”
The plot is nice, and while many loathe the ending, I like it. It adds to that mysterious charm. Sadly, it is embedded in this overly amateur, unsatisfying wording covered up by a decent cover and great opening prologue, that it becomes forgettable. It is still a nice compact story to bring you on, say, a long road trip, and opens Baramuli to many creative possibilities. But like the lame cartoons of the main characters in the biodata, Baramuli could’ve used some fixing. Certainly not “Amazing”, dear publisher.
GENRE: Detective, mystery
PAGES: 407
PUBLISHER: Visimedia
AGE RATING: 13+
LANGUAGE: Indonesian
ISBN: 979–065–168–6
