I was struggling with this one but when I found out it's actually a novelization of a play, it suddenly made so much sense. I think it would be much more effective in its original medium. So much of the tension is in these scenes where characters are trying to out-bluff each other and I can imagine how fun those scenes would have been to watch on stage, but the novelization made them feel kind of flat and boring, maybe because the author didn't embellish his descriptions of the characters' reactions very much, so they really do sound more like stage directions than trying to capture the specific way an actor might have performed the stage directions.