The Apartment

This is one of those books that starts off very slow.  The author develops the character as if he were peeling an onion.  Each layer is revealed slowly.  I have to say I have mixed feelings about this book.

We first meet the main character when he decides to board a plane for Paris. He is ex military who served in Afghanistan.  After he left the military he formed his own company and went back to the Mideast. He randomly chose Paris because he wanted to be near a city and figured why not this one. He likes anonymity .  The reader knows very little about what makes this character tick and the author takes his time revealing it.  In fact, it seems that he is a little slow to let the reader in to who this man is and for me it took some of the enjoyment out of the book.  It is not that I needed immediate gratification in knowing this information it is just that he gets caught up in a lot of other things. 

The main character is living in a hotel and wants to put down roots so with the help of a woman he has just recently met he sets out to find an apartment.  This is less than two hundred pages so you can get through it relatively quickly.  It is not what I would call an exciting read and may not be a good choice for a summer read but I did find the characters interesting and I did like the authors take on Paris in winter.