This was definitely one of the more sour tasting Pendergast novels. I had several upsets along the way. Some of the wording in the book was very repetitive, not just used often but used close together as well. For example - As he dove under the water the propeller missed his head by inches. He breached the surface and a gunshot rang out missing his head by inches. 
 There were a lot of missed by mere inch moments. I feel overall revelations in this book jump the shark, perhaps even a few times. Also, if the Dr. Felder and Corrie Swanson side stories were deleted altogether, this book in the series would be quite short. Those little jumps in the story were extremely boring to me, and provided absolutely no forward movement for the plot. If they are going to be expounded upon in subsequent novels, the authors should have just put those elements into the next one. 
 I usually enjoy finishing a Pendergast novel and comparing notes with my sister. Discussing which parts I enjoyed, which parts I had unanswered questions on, and we deliberate our hypotheses. With this one now concluded and I look back on it, there really wasn't too much to really enjoy compared to earlier works. 
 One statement that stuck out like a ugly, grotesque thumb, was when D'gosta was looking into this serial killer, and he says to himself in an inner monologue, how that he and Pendergast had worked on several cases in the past, but this one was the most strange. When that line came out, I had my own inner monologue that went something like this: 
 Wait, hold up. Seriously the strangest. Some douchebag serial killer is murdering people and leaving body parts at the crime scene and a message. That is weird, but remember that case where something was killing people and removing their brains and taking a large bite out of it. Or when some guy was stalking people and removing sections of their spines and creating some bizarre formula to slow the aging process. Or when there was the possibility of zombies roaming the streets of N.Y. Or even stranger still people being murdered by a possible demon. 
 Now those cases were strange, but this little serial killer didn't seem very interesting at all, and even less interesting was who the serial killer turns out to be. That individual would be the flying leap over the shark I mentioned. Furthermore, I just don't think the concept of the whole Nazis being involved grasped me. I'm hoping they fix their formula for the next Pendergast novel and give us another top notch stand alone. Overall, the wait for this newest edition seemed very anti-climatic.