If this hadn’t been so short and for a new country in my personal reading the world challenge, I may have abandoned it. A strong start and a pretty good ending can’t make up for the middle sections which I plodded through. 

It sounds good in theory - a dead successor found with a gun next to him - was it suicide or murder? We hear from a few different perspectives, all people who could have been implicit, by accident or on purpose, in the successor’s death. 

But half the time I felt like the prose was just going round in circles, and the one woman we hear from, the successor’s daughter, her chapter is just so full of gratuitous sex… not for me. 

Maybe give it a go if you’re one for reading about corrupt politicians, but for my first Kadare I’m not that impressed.