Murder by Death

Hands down, no argument from me, Poe is a genius.  Whatever problems, challenges or shortcomings he had, his intelligence was not one of them.

But while I can appreciate the genius and the intellect that went into this story, I still found it tedious to the extreme.  Dupin (who is, in my personal opinion, Poe's alter ego), absolutely loves the sound of his own voice and fully 85% of the story is his detailed lecture on the inaccuracies of a number of newspapers and the articles they wrote covering the murder.  It is by this method that Dupin arrives at a solution that everyone else has overlooked.

Except the story ends in a frustratingly unsatisfactory way.  I read the last paragraph and was left with "wtf?!?"

I'm going to mark this book as finished now, because I've read what I set out to read.  But I wish I'd finished with The Gold Bug rather than this one; I feel like I've gone out on a weak note for Poe.  HIs genius is evident in this one, but the appeal is not.