Tedious Read The author, in her attempt to provide evocative and thought-provoking perceptions of the Chaos theory, supplies the reader instead with a tedious and hard-to-follow story. The characters are stilted, and Barbara Holloway's sudden and intense affair with a mathematics professor is frankly unbelievable. It casts the lawyer into the role of a teenager with a crush. Also, it appears that Wilhelm loathes descriptive narrative of her characters; a concise description of Holloway is not given in any of the Holloway books. Being unable to bond with the characters creates a lackluster and confusing tale.
Slow It took me forever to read this book. Usually I finish a good mystery in a couple of days. The book never engaged me,so when I finally learned "who did it", I just didn't care.Confusing and depressing I feel compelled to be the first to enter a negative review for this book. I generally like books that invite the reader to learn more about a related or tangential subject, but I found the descriptions of the Mandelbrot images extremely difficult to fathom. It left me feeling like an outsider and rather skeptical of the effects attributed to the images. And while I am often pleased and excited by surprise endings or "twists", I found this one (don't want to give anything away) very distressing. I do have to give it 3 stars for an engaging plot and great human interest, but a lot of it left me cold, or chilled.
