Slacks for Ella Funt

It seems like literary mysteries are pretty popular right now—see The Historian, The Shadow of the Wind, The Club Dumas, etc. This one felt pretty generic, almost exactly the same as The Shadow of the Wind, but not as good. The hidden secrets from the past part was interesting, but the searcher/narrator in the present wasn’t so developed. Pretty much the only characteristic the narrator had was a fascination with her twin who had died at birth. I think these books work best when the mysterious past and the detective story present are both captivating stories, and are much less effective when the author neglects the present.