Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: A powerful flop!

The title (Riddle of the Sands) is exotic but beyond that - it is an unbelievably boring tale of two friends who come together at some godforsaken islands to reveal a British traitor. That's the gist of the novel. But what follows is a convoluted storyline full of slang, garbled nautical lingo rendered in half completed sentences that have no head or tail. Understanding such a text will require a supercomputer not to speak of a mere mortal. The writer seems to have written this book in some opium-induced hallucinatory trance. This is a heck of a one-way trip to self-congratulatory egotism, if I ever saw one