Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: An instruction manual would be more exciting

This novel was described as a "desperate race against time" and a "gripping journey into the darkest corners of the human soul". I found it to be a slow-paced, dreary attempt to make a jumble of inept, uninteresting characters into a story which leaves the readers bewildered about why they wasted their time reading it. It is impossible to bond in any way with any of the characters; the interrogation - broken up by other story lines which serve as a relief but not much else - is interminable, and the ending is about the most depressing ending possible. All in all, I found myself wondering, for this I slogged through this book? I listened to it on CD's, and but for the excellent narration of George Guidall would have given up on it long before. As is was, I still had to skip one of the disks just to get through with it.