Book Review: À Perfect Crime by A Yi

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Want to know whether A Perfect Crime by A Yi is worth the read? Here are my thoughts on the book to help you decide.

A Perfect Crime Review

A Perfect Crime by A Yi is a book I would react to with “What the fuck did I just read”.

The book was well paced and I finished it relatively fast as I finished it within a day but really though what the fuck did I read.

It’s the type of book that I feel would give me more had I known the correct lens to read it from but as of now, my feelings are just mixed.

I am not really bamboozled nor puzzled by it. Just slightly confused as to why this book was written and why he committed the crime.

But do we even need a why? Does brutal murder even need a logical reason? Or is that just a fallacy that we created to make our crazy world less crazy.

To have a logic to all this chaos? Or am I over-analyzing something that doesn’t have merit to be over-analyzed.

Basically, the main character of A Perfect Crime is about a teenage boy who murdered his female classmate because he was bored.

He didn’t even plan the murder or nothing but that wasn’t the point, he wanted to be caught, he wanted to plat cat and mouse with the authorities so in a sense he did commit the perfect crime even when he was caught because it was all in the plan.

I just want to know why. Why did he do it?

But, perhaps, there is no why.

A Perfect Crime Synopsis

Title: A Perfect Crime

Author: A Yi

Published: 7 May 2015

Publisher: Point Blank

Rating: 3/5

A chilling literary thriller about a motiveless murder in provincial China.

On a normal day in provincial China, a teenager goes about his regular business, but he’s also planning the brutal murder of his only friend.

He lures her over, strangles her, stuffs her body into the washing machine and flees town, whereupon a perilous game of cat-and-mouse begins.

A shocking investigation into the despair that traps the rural poor as well as a technically brilliant excursion into the claustrophobic realm of classic horror and suspense, A Perfect Crime is a thrilling and stylish novel about a motiveless murder that echoes Kafka’s absurdism, Camus’ nihilism and Dostoyevsky’s depravity.

With exceptional tonal control, A Yi steadily reveals the psychological backstory that enables us to make sense of the story’s dramatic violence and provides chillingly apt insights into a country on the cusp of enormous social, political and economic change.

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