This book is a complete Zeitgeist to the early nineties: people smoke everywhere, there are a lot of inappropriate terms thrown around about the gay community (such as 'Maybe he was having an HIV test done on the sly. I appreciated that in my first reading, but this time it felt clunky and the fact that DNA usage in crimes was only in the first stages means that if this book was written now the crime would definitely be solved a lot faster than it was. Something else that hampered my enjoyment of the novel was that you could definitely feel how dated it was.

Similarly, Marino questions the likelihood of Bill being the murderer, but it never goes further than sheer speculation (despite the fact that he quickly goes on an impromptu holiday across country) and it would have been interesting to see that developed more thoroughly. At the end of the novel, we receive the information that Matt Petersen passed a polygraph, but because we don't get the information at the time it feels as though it's a loose end throughout. It also feels as though the two previous suspects aren't investigated as thoroughly as they could be. For someone who likes a cerebral read, trying to spot the red herrings against the genuine clues throughout the novel, to have no chance of guessing who performed the crime was a huge disappointment. Marino is convinced that the murderer is Matt Petersen, then he believes it may be Bill Boltz the boyfriend, but when it's eventually revealed that it's a character we've had no interaction with in the past it feels like a cheap escape clause.

As well as an annoying lead character, the discovery of the serial killer is a massive disappointment.

Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell