It should have ended before it started

I just finished reading Martha Grimes book "Dust". I want my money back.

I thought her last book was ridiculous, but I forgot how bad it was until I started reading Dust. It wanders all over the place, even back to that stupid last book, and it never ends.

I took about 2 weeks to read the book as I only read one chapter at a time. And I skimmed through a lot of paragraph as there were a lot of words that just filled up space and did nothing to advance the story. In the next to the last chapter, the story only half ended. At first, I thought I had skipped some important paragraphs or maybe even whole pages, but nope. The conclusion just wasn't there. It's like she didn't know the answers to her own questions, or she got bored with the story.

Then the last chapter. Yeah, as usual there was another chapter after the end of the story. The protagonist (a Scotland yard detective) had been screwing around with 2 woman, one a coroner and one a police detective. For some reason, the police detective was involved in a car wreck that shattered every bone in her body so they called the coroner. (The detective wasn't dead, but maybe they were just being proactive.) The coroner went to the scene of the crash, held the detective's hand while they loaded her onto the stretcher, then ran through the drenching rain (it's always in the drenching rain) to the protagonist's apartment to tell him his other girlfriend was all smashed up. The end.

The wreck had nothing to do with the story, but I suppose it's meant to make you want to buy her next book which may or may not continue this one.

I'm really not a fan of Grimes' style of writing, but for some reason I find her odd characters interesting. In this book, she ignored more of her usual characters to concentrate more on the 'screwing around', if you know what I mean.

Oh, well, on to the next book - it's by an author new to me even though I've seen his works adapted into TV movies which I watched because they starred Tom Selleck. And I bought the book because I liked the movies.

It's just one big roundabout, isn't it?