This was the last book I finished the last day of 2022. I have loved everything I have read by Charles Dickens (though I haven't read all his works yet), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood is not an exception. It has the feels of psychological thriller at parts, and the feels of a comedy at other parts, and of course one couldn't miss the wit, and the sarcasm, and the social and religious criticism that are so characteristic I think in Charles Dickens. Unfortunately, Dickens died before he could complete this book, and the story was left incomplete half way through, which also means that we don't have an ending. I'm certain that if he had finished it, it could have become a favorite of many. There are plenty of things to be discussed and thought of while reading this book. One of the things that I thought very early in the book was that because readers of today know from the get go that Edwin disappears at some point (this is not a spoiler)--alive or dead that is another story--something that the Dickens' readers wouldn't know until much later because the story was serialized, we have a disadvantage. Because we know from the get go that one of the characters will disappear, we also get to be biased from the get go towards one of the main characters who also becomes for us one of the main suspects. Whether he did something or not, that is also another story. The issue is that from the first pages, we are set up to predjudge and point the finger at that one particular character before we even get to Edwin's disappearance; therefore, we must think at least at the early stages of the book if Jasper can really stand a fair trial with the readership. Of course, Dickens is great at challenging our presumptions and bias and even at times made us point the finger at different possibilities until, I think, he makes it pretty clear what has happened, who is responsible (if anyone), and why.
I found Dickens' writing in terms of the sentence structure at times quite difficult, even more difficult than his other works I have read. Other than that, this is an enjoyable book and I believe that it is worth reading whatever we have left from the text.