Book Review – Tell Tale by Jeffrey Archer – 2019 – Full of Surprise Twists

Rating of Tell Tale – 4.5 out of 5

The only reason I’m not giving a 5 to this is because this left me wanting for more!!

Plot Summary – Tell Tale

This starts off with a story that’s a 100 word long with a proper beginning, body and an end. There’s another 100 word one in this collection and both are absolute gems! It speaks volumes about Jeffrey Archer’s creative genius that he can come up with such pearls of brilliance!! The best of the collection, is the Mayor’s story and you almost don’t see the end coming. All stories end with the trademark Jeffrey Archer twist and boy, there are some mean ones!!

The compilation is about 270 odd pages, so I suggest, you run through it. Because, believe you me, this is one un-putdownable collection of short stories where one story vies with the next for the ‘Best’ crown, and the final verdict is a photo-finish!!! Can’t wait for the November 2018 release of Heads You Win – first 4 chapters are a Teaser part of this collection – promises to be an absolute stunner on the lines of Kane and Abel.

 

A young impressionable detective from Naples, Lt. Antonio Rossetti, travels to a small unimportant Italian town of Campania, where the Mayor has been murdered. His bosses in Naples want him back at the earliest and the detective hopes to close this quickly and return as well. But once he starts looking into it, he finds almost everybody in the small town both had the motive, as well as the opportunity to have committed the crime. Some even confess to have committed the crime and give proof of having done so. Befuddled at this bizarre scenario, what does the detective do?

 

 

Be it a woman asking for a lift and getting an unexpected jolt or the Senior Vice President fighting against an evil Corporation, the stories are fascinating, quirky and utterly believable. It takes a true writing genius to come up with stories with all the elements of a fleshed out novel, all within a 100 words! The last one in the collection has another interesting twist – the reader can choose one of two endings, both of which are perfectly credible! What an effort!!