Manuela’s Review of “Who Killed Jerusalem?” by George Albert Brown

By: Manuela Soares

This book took longer to finish than I anticipated, and it took me a trip. I’m a bit torn on this one, on one hand, I did like bits and pieces of it but on the other, it just didn’t quite do it for me. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express”, where you have one death on a means of transportation, plenty of people who knew the deceased, and an incoming detective to figure everything out. There were some parts that read slowly for me and others where I couldn’t stop reading. It is well-written and it has some great twists and banter that gave me a giggle a time or two. I think that if you’re a fan of William Blake, into murder mysteries and literary fiction, and like philosophical thinking this may be just the book for you.

Thank you very much George Albert Brown & RR Book Tours for a digital copy to read and review.

Summary:

A budding cult classic that dramatically splits the reviewers. Which side will you be on?

A seamless melding of the intricate plotting of Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose; the side-splitting humor of John Kennedy Toole in A Confederacy of Dunces; and the fabulous world of William Blake.

In 1977, Ickey Jerusalem, San Francisco’s golden-boy poet laureate, is found dead in a locked, first-class toilet on an arriving red-eye flight.

Ded Smith, a desperately unhappy, intelligent philistine with a highly developed philosophy to match, is called in to investigate the poet’s death. Thus begins a series of hilarious encounters with the members of Jerusalem’s coterie.

Ded soon realizes that to find out what happened, he must not only collect his usual detective’s clues but also, despite his own poetically challenged outlook, get into the dead poet’s mind. Fighting his way through blasphemous funerals, drug-induced dreams, poetry-charged love-making, offbeat philosophical discussions, and much, much more, he begins to piece together Jerusalem’s seductive, all-encompassing metaphysics.

But by then, the attempts to kill Ded and the others have begun.

Before Ded’s death-dodging luck runs out, will he be able to solve the case, and perhaps in the process, develop a new way of looking at the world that might allow him to replace his unhappiness with joy?

*This review is also posted on the Fathoms Amidst the Lines bookstagram page and Goodreads.