In preparation for watching the Super Bowl, my spouse purchased a giant bag of potato chips. He didn't tell me he'd gotten them until he was heading to his friend's house to watch the game because he loves me and he knows I have absolutely no self-control when it comes to potato chips. Once the bag is open, I'm seduced by the grease and the crunch and even though they tear up my mouth and make my stomach feel miserable, I keep eating them until the entire bag of kettle-cooked sin is empty. They're tasty, but not tasty enough to keep me from regretting the potato-chip hangover. 
 This is kind of how I felt reading this novel. It was a tasty read, but not tasty enough to justify my compulsion to shove aside my morning tasks to finish the novel. The plot got bogged down by routine: the constant driving back and forth across Dublin, talking and re-talking to witnesses. The "initial here and sign there" statement-taking might be realistic, but it certainly wasn't scintillating reading. Moran and Conway's motivations were dilute and their thought processes convoluted, and then there was a plot twist with a walk-on character that French seems to have added to serve a relationship-building purpose but that didn't fit the rest of the book. French usually does pretty well with her characters, but these seemed to be walking, talking paper dolls. And she used the word "tattoo" in the sense of "tapping a tattoo on the corner of the desk," which makes me roll my eyes hard enough to cause injury. People mostly seem to use that word just to appear clever, and that annoys the crap out of me. 
 But like with the potato chips, even with all of the things that annoyed me about this novel, even knowing that I was going to regret phoning in my morning responsibilities and the headache that the afternoon would surely hold as a result, I kept reading. 
 After I finish gorging myself on potato chips, I eat loads of salad and drink gallons of water and after twelve hours or so, I feel pretty much back to normal with only a slight aftertaste of self-loathing for once again doing exactly what I shouldn't do. Now that I've crunched my way through The Trespasser, I'm going to have to find the literary equivalent of salad and water.