House Rules & Red Herrings

House Rules attempts to create a mystery feel to the book and frequently uses literary tactics to achieve this tone common to most mystery novels. This book constantly refers to “Red Herrings” to divert the reader’s attention from a significant fact and misdirect the audience’s suspicion of a character or information. Jacob constantly uses the Red Herring device to create his perfect crime scene. A crime scene where he makes the police and the reader, at the beginning, believe that the tutor’s boyfriend or Jacob killed Jess Maguire. At the end of the novel it is revealed to us that Jacob positioned all the evidence so that the crime scene did not illuminate Theo’s participation in the death of Jacob’s tutor. Jacob’s steady utterance of Red Herrings throughout this book led me to question the composition of Jodi Picoult’s story. After coming to terms with the misdirection theme, I realized that many elements of the plot that had nothing to do with the crime were also red herrings in a way. The Rich Matson character, the detective that implemented Jacob, had no real purpose to the development of this story. At one point, the story made it seem like Matson was noticing the discrepancies in the crime scene and started to suggest that there was more to the crime when he reexamined the evidence. Matson started to become attached to Jacob but then his character just disappears. Also Matson’s almost romance with Emma was not necessary. Matson in multiple instances describes Emma’s warm caramel brown eyes and how he could see himself in a relationship with Emma. But it was pretty obvious that this relationship would never happen since Matson was the one who arrested Jacob. So why even include the potential romance! It seems to me many components of the plot were employed just to fill pages!