Death Qualified by Kate Wilhelm (0)

Okay, another stinker. The thing that really got me here was that I got confused in this book by too much talk of mathematics and science. I have never liked either subject, so that turned me off immediately. Too much was over my head: chaos theory, butterfly effect, and this new research involving Mandelbrot images (which I had never heard of and had to look up--although because of the book, I was almost afraid to look at them!). Somehow looking at these computer images did something to people's minds. It was like they had discovered a whole other realm, but it drove some mad and caused several various deaths. They said it was like trying to describe beautiful music to someone who had never heard or a beautiful painting to someone who has never seen. It was incredibly strange and beyond my grasp. It was also a murder mystery, where a lawyer is trying to defend a woman accused of killing her husband who had been MIA for 7 years and then showed up only to be killed. Another thing that bothered me was that the main character, the lawyer Barbara, had a horrid "woe is me" attitude. The world is a mess, the legal system is a mess, nothing makes sense, I wish for utopia and since I can't have it, I'll run away and bury my head in the sand, yet whine about how everything is so unfair. Give me a break. We all live in the same unfair world, but we don't all run from everything and bury our heads in the sand. And she was convinced that God just sets everyone up. The narrator in the audiobook was the one I dislike the most, Anna Fields, so that made it even worse. Also, I don't know what was wrong with the audiobook, but it kept repeating multiple lines. It was very annoying. This book is the first in a series, but from what I gather from the descriptions, the main character is the only repeating character, so I assume the mysteries left unknown will not be revealed in future novels. WARNING: the next lines contain spoilers! The end was very frustrating. The killer and the main character's boyfriend apparently go off a cliff in a struggle, but we don't know if they are ever found. We are left to assume that they both die. The boyfriend has apparently received some weird "power" from viewing these disks, but it is still so unclear and confusing as to what is happening to him. The other thing left hanging, which is something I saw coming a mile away, is that two children of main characters in the story view the disks and are now behaving in a similarly strange manner. So what happens to them? Who knows.