THE QUIET GAME (Greg Iles) - April 12/12

I'm pretty conflicted with this one. On the one hand, Iles is clearly a talented writer and The Quiet Game is packed with twists and compelling characters. But on the other hand, the book is just unreasonably overlong. Iles devotes page after to page to superfluous elements that eventually become exhausting. As such, the novel is really only entertaining in spurts - with the revelation that Penn might have an illegitimate daughter propelling the narrative right through to the exciting climactic court case. But the book should've been so much better (ie much as I like the characters, I really doubt I'll ever read another Iles novel). **1/2 out of ****