The cover would not catch my eye. And a retelling is not normally my cup of tea, so those two things immediately turned me off. The synopsis did not interest me in the least, but I still gave the excerpt a go. My first thought was “A Rollicking Literary Murder Mystery” seems misleading. Based on the excerpt, I'm not finding anything in this story funny or “rollicking.” I recognized attempts at humor and felt they would be best appreciated by early teen boys. I didn’t care about the characters, and I found the philosophical tie-ins to be juvenile, like the author was trying hard to make a silly book deep. This is a hard pass for me.