I Can't Get No Satisfaction From This Book

I had high hopes for Double Negative by David Carkeet, a murder mystery set in the offices of a group linguists focused on child language development. For me, a linguistics nut (I love to calculate my kids' MLU for fun), I thought this would be a great read. Wrong! The characters were not well developed, the main character and the police chief had a completely unreasonable relationship, and there really wasn't much speech pathology-ology happening to grab my attention, either. No suspense, no intrigue. I guess it really couldn't be called a mystery. I did finish the book, but in my defense, I have a sickness that way, and only the most banal of books can make me stop reading before the end. I always hold out hope that things will get better, but I should trust my first instincts more often and just chuck 'em when they start to smell. I wouldn't have missed much had I put Double Negative down and walked away. Pfft. That's all I have to say.