“It was a dark and stormy night. Is that one way to catch your reader?” This is how Ray Bradbury begins his most recent novel, “Let’s All Kill Constance.”

On the aforementioned stormy night in Venice, Calif., Constance Rattigan bangs on the bungalow door of the novel’s unnamed hero.

She is scared out of her wits and is soaking wet. She manages to produce the sources of her terror — her old address book with her name and the names of some of her friends circled in red with crucifixes next to them and an aged phone book, both mysteriously mailed to her.

Constance, an actress approaching her golden years, and the narrator, a writer, interpret the books as “Books of the Dead.” Constance disappears during the night, and the writer embarks on a bumpy ride to track her down and figure out the meaning and origin of the two books.

The hero calls his friend and unwilling sidekick, a disgruntled man aptly named Crumley, to chauffeur him around in a beat-up jalopy. They visit Constance’s ex-husband, an old hermit on top of a mountain who stockpiles old copies of newspapers, and go to see Queen Califia, a large and eccentric psychic.

Crumley and the narrator end up repeatedly at Grauman’s, a broken-down movie theater in which Constance’s father resides, as the former projectionist still holed up in his now-defunct projection room.

In the course of solving the mystery, the sleuth writer enlists the help of other friends, a sarcastic and wise blind man named Henry and an angry German director named Fritz Wong. As the people with circled names start actually dying, in a topsy-turvy fashion they stumble their way toward the unexpected answer to the mystery surrounding Constance Rattigan.

“Let’s All Kill Constance” has its moments: The character of Crumley is oddly hilarious and the plotline is completely unpredictable, even surprising; however, the book is largely a letdown.

I had no clue as to the motivations of any of the characters, the hero included. They seem to be risking life and limb out of sheer lack of anything else better to do. The characters themselves are only half-baked, as Bradbury’s lack of characterization left me with but a modicum of insight into who I was reading about.

Bradbury attempts to make the novel sarcastic and biting, but it comes off as merely silly. Take the conversational tone between Crumley and the main character: “‘You’re beginning to sound a lot like me,’ Crumley said. ‘God help me, I hope not. I mean —’ ‘It’s okay. You’ll never be Crumley, just like I’ll never be Jules Verne Junior.'” Their bitter rapport is comical only because it is awkward and inconsistent; rather than providing comic relief it only adds to the confusion of the novel.

Though the plot is unpredictable, it is also confusing. The characters are led to a number of strange places containing even stranger characters, but why they are led there is not always evident.

The characters seem to be operating in a vacuum — the setting of the story is never developed to where the reader can imagine any sort of surroundings. For instance, the jalopy in which Crumley and the narrator are cavorting around in is never described as anything but “the jalopy.”

In his attempts to be stylistically innovative, Bradbury fails, and does so at the expense of shortchanging his audience. “Let’s All Kill Constance” is a half-hearted (at best) endeavor at a sarcastic screwball whodunit, but it falls drastically short of the mark.

Given the original and creative works that Bradbury has produced in the past, such as “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles,” I found “Let’s All Kill Constance” to be extremely disappointing.