AOL's Book Maven

As Galley Cat noted last week, Henry Holt's bet on 'The Interpretation of Murder' by Jed Rubenfeld was a losing one. "You win some, you lose some" Sarah Weinman posted.

Very true, although that is currently cold comfort to Holt's John Sterling, whose loss was rather large, as Jeff Trachtenberg details in this Wall Street Journal article.

I won't rehash Sarah or Jeff's coverage; the reason I'm blogging today is because I covered 'The Interpretation of Murder' on AOL Books and I want to tell you how I made that selection.

A couple of things: first, I met and interviewed Jed Rubenfeld earlier this year at BookExpo America, before his book was released, and before I read it. I was intrigued by Rubenfeld's passion for Freud (he's a Yale Law professor who has researched and written on the famed father of modern psychiatry).

Second, I read the book over the summer. I'll confess: I had a good time reading it, but did not love it. When I finished, I felt dissatisfied overall, although I absolutely loved a couple of Rubenfeld's characters and told several colleagues that I wished he'd told the entire story from the perspective of Rosa, a brave young Jewish woman who falls in love with an equally brave young policeman.

Third, while I didn't love the book, I thought it was interesting and dynamic enough that many other people might. I'm more in the John Sterling camp, as noted in the WSJ piece: "Mr. Sterling says he agrees that book publishing, for all its planning, remains a roll of the dice. 'I still marvel that despite everything we do, we just don't know,' he says. 'It's the wonderful thing and the agonizing thing about the business.'"

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