I'm setting this aside at 39%. My disappointment is starting to mutate into a level of annoyance that's preventing me from engaging with the book. I'm not willing to spend another five hours on it.

I knew 'Holmes, Margaret and Poe' was a bit of a gamble but I bought the book because I liked the concept. If it worked, it would give me a whole new series to follow and if it turned out to be a graphic novel in prose, well, it might still be a smile.

As it turned out, I'm not smiling. I wouldn't finish a graphic novel with this quality of storytelling.

The book was disappointing from the start. The writing had a bare-bones, first-draft feel. It did just enough to carry the plot but not enough to stimulate my imagination. The characterisation was minimal and simplistic. The signs of wealth and sophistication were juvenile and unconvincing.

I started to lose sympathy with the story when I was told that the sophisticated, handsome, charismatic Poe dressed hid bed with black silk sheets (how 1970s teen boy fantasy is that?) and that the woman who has woken up in his bed is impressed by Poe's expertise in pressing and pouring coffee from a French Press. How does that count as expertise and why would a woman who is a prominent lawyer in New York be impressed by it?

Then there was the inconsistent image I got of Marple. Other characters assess Marple as young and attractive but she describes herself as 'an old lady in the corner'. What was that about?

The plot initially had a breathless pace and a level of implausibility that reminded me of an early episode of 'Scorpion'.

I almost set the book aside then.

I stuck with it because the plot branched off into multiple cases simultaneously and I hoped to get hooked by the mysteries. I was also curious about who these three people really were and how they'd come to be working together.

I was encouraged when the client in one case was an obnoxious, narcissistic, billionaire with no taste (imagine that). I liked that Marple assessed him as 'disgust at first sight'. The billionaire never became anything more than a lazily drawn stereotype. The increasingly caustic encounters between him and the team served mostly to make the team look like cocky juveniles.

It seemed to me that the storytelling wasn't able to support simultaneous mysteries being investigated. The narrative felt thin and chaotic.

The characters of Holmes, Marple and Poe did develop a little but not enough to make them interesting. Individually and collectively they felt like plot devices rather than people.

Then I started to notice how the women in the book were always described as if through eyes of a hormonal teenage boy.

Nope, I wasn't smiling any more. I no longer cared what the backstory was. I felt as though I'd been sold characters who didn't live up to the expectations set by their names.

After a little over three hours, this was a book that I was glad to set aside.

Probably the best part of the book was the narration. I liked the use of multiple narrators, I'd have liked it more if the narrator playing Marple had voiced all of Marple's dialogue. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/penguin-books/holmes-margaret-and-poe-by-james-patterson-... ( )