“Red Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes”

“Kind of like one of those heist movies where the story comes together.

I don’t like those movies very much.

They can be fun. The Usual Suspects was a pretty gutsy move in storytelling. But it worked. The Richard Stark novels are a blast.

With this, I don’t know. To be honest, I didn’t even know that these stories were supposed to wrap up to a big ending. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here. But I don’t actually know! That’s the whole thing. I’m not sure if it was obvious that there was a big story at play here and I’m just thick, or if that’s supposed to be a shock. I can’t actually say whether I was supposed to know that there was a setup of sorts going on or not.

Another thing, I think the art is good, but I had some trouble telling characters apart. There were two male characters and two female characters who looked quite a bit alike. At one point I was flipping around trying to figure out whether a character was having an affair or not because I wasn’t sure which guy I was looking at.

The mini stories within the story were pretty good. The various weird crimes, that was some interesting stuff. But the connective tissue just didn’t do it for me.”