Quick read that kept me entertained. It follows LAPD Detective Tully Jarsdel who used to be a professor at university. The crime is that a museum curator is shot point blank and there are many people at his work that really don't care for him. As the case unwinds you find yourself on Catalina Island with some pirates and trying to unravel the whole mess.

Thank you #NetGalley for the advance copy!

A tale in which you follow LAPD Detective Tully around as he is trying to solve a murder. This book will keep you going with plenty of twists and turns as to who you think might have done it all the way to the end. Found this to be a good book with good characters.

To be honest, I picked this up because of the pretty cover and intrigued by the title and the blurb. I wish I read the first two installment of this series first, maybe it will be easier for me to connect with the main character.

I was not aware that this was the third book in a series when I requested it on Netgalley to receive an ARC and once approved, began reading it, so that may impact my overall rating of the book. I liked that the protagonist is a history professor, as that was someone I could relate to, but I struggled to connect with the main character, Tully. I'm unlikely to pick up any other books in this series as I struggled to get into the story.

Thank you for this arc copy of this book. It wasn't; my type of book but others may like it. I did enjoy the cover picture though.

I have this thing of getting books that are part of a series and then getting confused with characters. I struggled with part of this one, and though i didn’t hate it, I wished i would have read the first 2 books

That completely blew my mind. I’m fully attached to the characters right until the end. I loved it. Can’t even sum up all the good things about this book in one simple review.

Cheers indeed, Netgalley.

The Darkest Game is an excellent police procedural with an interesting crime and a trove of well-defined and unusual characters. Tully Jarsdel is a cerebral detective who left his PhD program just nanoseconds before completing his degree in history. With an about face, he joined the Los Angeles police academy and his two professorial fathers are still at odds with his decision. Throw into the mix Tully’s partner, Oscar Morales, and you have two very competent, if not a bit unconventional, detectives.

In this third book of the series, Tully and Oscar are investigating a murder of a man who is employed at the Huntington Museum. As the investigation leads the two detectives to Catalina Island they begin to uncover a wide conspiracy fueled by greed and dark secrets.

This is the first book I’ve read by Joseph Schneider and it was a thoroughly enjoyable read. The story is rich with descriptions and the author’s use of the language added to my enjoyment. Overall, the story is well-paced and, at least for me, it was never boring or slow. Without a doubt, it’s 4.5 *s.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a copy of this book for review.

Gay detective Tully Jarsdel finds himself taking on a murder of a Huntington Library official. This is right up his alley as he is a lover of the museum, and it fits with his educated past before he became a LAPD detective. The secrets of LA land grab is right out of present day newspaper accounts. HIs journey to uncovered the answers to the murder takes him to the Catalina Island and its playground to the wealthy and not so wealthy inhabitants. His homosexuality is not at the forefront of the work. It's just a very satisfying murder mystery.

My thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for this free ebook in exchange for a unbiased review.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the free pdf. Excellent mystery that also introduces a unique detective from a different culture I look forward to others in the series.

The Darkest Game was a solid police procedural: good mystery with layered complexities, easy to follow, and interesting side-conflicts for characters. Also appreciated this was the third book in the LAPD Detective Tully Jarsdel Mysteries series and was able to jump in without the need to read the first two. Very enjoyable and a nice change from the typical “thriller”.

Thank you to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for the ARC.

The Darkest Game by Joseph Schneider

Bad things happen everyday. No one knows this better than LAPD Detective Tully Jarsdel. He also knows that bad things often go unpunished.

This book was a little dry, slow moving and had sarcastic tones. I did not enjoy this book.

Great whodunit and I loved the setting of Catalina Island.
Many thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

I found this book a little slow to begin, and the characters a little under developed. The story was interesting though and I wanted to read to the end to find out all that happened.

3.5 rounded up

LAPD Homicide Detectives Tully Jarsdel and Oscar Morales are assigned to the murder of museum donation engagement director Dean Burken. Dean wasn't the nicest guy in the world and there are plenty of suspects. The investigation takes them through academia, museum employees, and even the museum's board of directors. From LA to Catalina Island. Will they be able to solve the murder and find a motive before its too late?

This is my first book by the author, and as it turns out, this is book 3 in the series. This could be read as a stand alone, but you must be patient to get a lot of the back story on the characters. I liked that Jursdel wasn't your typical detective. He's sn academic who left his History Ph.D. program to pursue a career in police work, much to the dismay of both of his professor fathers. Tully comes across as likable to me and I enjoyed his "lectures" that seemed to rub his partner the wrong way. He doesn't really fit in with the other detectives and is often ostracized by his partner about his academic background. Morales I didn't care for. Instead of banter between him and Tully, he comes across as a colossal jerk who puts down Tully's knowledge, referring to him as "rain man." The mystery was decent, but the pacing was a little slow at times for a procedural, and took me out of the story. Overall a decent read though.

My thanks to Poisoned Pen Press, author Joseph Schneider, and NetGalley for gifting me a digital copy of this book. My opinions are my own.

This one just didn't hit all the things I love about a good police procedural mystery. I wanted more from the story, and it felt very slow and wordy at times. I liked the characters enough, but really didn't care about more than finding out the answers to all the questions and even those weren't much of a mystery. Overall I just wanted more.

This book was so good! I want to see more from this author in the future!! I couldn't put this book down. What a page turner!!!

I’m going to be honest: I’ve put off reviewing Joseph Schneider’s The Darkest Game for a while now, mainly because I hoped to find another book that I could pair it with for this review – and that’s mainly because I feel like I have almost nothing to really say about this book. There’s nothing especially wrong with The Darkest Game, which is apparently the third book in a series about Tully Jarsdel, the son of two college professors and an academic in temperament who’s now working as a murder detective for the LAPD. Stop me if you’ve heard this: he’s prickly, he doesn’t get along with people, he doesn’t tolerate fools – but dammit, he gets the job done!

You can probably see where this is going from here. Yes, in theory, the novelties here are the specifics, but I’m going to tell you, it’s been maybe two weeks since I read The Darkest Game, and almost nothing about the book has stuck with me in that time. Jarsdel’s approach rubs people the wrong way; he doesn’t like a lot of the cops and he looks down his nose at them. But he’s brilliant and knows a lot about…well, about most anything convenient for this plot, which in this case revolves around a dead museum curator whose death catches Jarsdel’s attention. There’s a somewhat intriguing motivation at the bottom of it all, but not enough of one to make the book really stand out – more of a “huh” than a “wow.”

All of this sounds like I hated The Darkest Game, and that’s not the case. It was completely fine – it kept me reading, the prose is fine, the story is engaging enough. But there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before, and seen done better. There’s better books out there for your time.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book, in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Detective Tully Jarsdel is not your average police detective. He was close to getting his Ph.D in history, when he chose to drop out of grad school and go to the police academy. He's highly successful at solving crimes, but he doesn't really fit in with people. His partner is reasonably tolerant of him, but he tends to annoy people by launching into lectures about the history of persons, places, or things that have some sort of relationship to the investigation. Not to mention using "twenty dollar words"!

This book shows him having a good deal of trouble getting along with people. Often, when interrogating a witness/suspect, he'll say just the wrong thing, antagonizing the other person and hurting his ability to get information from them. He's also shown having trouble getting along with his dads, one of whom is from Iran and is unwilling to talk about his experiences there before fleeing the country.

The mystery itself is not really as interesting as the characters. Almost all of them are very unlikable, but in interesting ways. I found myself much more focused on that than on trying to figure out who did what to whom. I enjoyed the book, but I wasn't particularly invested in figuring out the murders!

At first, I had a hard time getting into the book. I couldn't help comparing it to a Michael Connelly book, which it isn't, but I soon found that it was still a good story. Though some sections get bogged down in unrelated detail, there is enough of the police investigation to keep the plot moving. I liked the behind-the-scenes look at the Huntington, and the details of the trip to Catalina. Such background is always a plus in a novel. The only real quibbles I had were the often ornate prose, reading more like a freshman assignment in "creative writing," and the animosity between Jarsdel and Morales. Would police partners really be so against each other? This is the first of the series that I read, and I intend to read the others.