Will and Jeff are half-brothers who have recently gotten back in touch with each other, and the relationship between them is uneasy at best. They are at the bar The Wild Zone with their friend Tom when they see a lone woman drinking at a table. They make a bet as to which one can chat her up and take her home. This is despite the fact that Jeff is in a relationship with Wild Zone bartender Kristin and Tom is married - albeit unhappily - to Elaine. The woman - Suzy - winds up picking Will, much to shock and anger of both Jeff and Tom. They don't go home together, but none of the men can get Suzy off their minds.
Jeff and Kristin have an open relationship, but Jeff's fascination with Suzy starts to come between them. Will has feelings for Suzy, but likes Kristin a lot and doesn't appreciate the way Jeff treats her. Tom's marriage with Elaine begins to fracture and he slowly loses his grip on reality. As for Suzy, she is married to a controlling, abusive husband, and having three guys so interested in her is not making life with her husband any easier. Their lives are destined to collide in unpredictable and violent ways.
As you might be able to tell from the plot description, The Wild Zone is more soap opera than it is a crime novel or thriller. As it is, it falls into that increasingly frequent - and annoying - category of a melodrama with a little bit of random murder thrown in to pass it off as a suspense novel. Admittedly there was some suspense, mainly in waiting to see how badly Tom would psychologically fall apart, but for the most part, this story went nowhere fast. The characters are very well-drawn, however, and that went a considerable way in keeping me involved in the story.
It finishes off with an absurd twist. While you can tell the author didn't simply pull it out of her hat, it didn't make it any easier to swallow. It meant that certain characters would have practically had to have been psychic to know that everybody would do what they did when they did it. Very silly. It did little to justify the slow, measured build-up that came before it.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
"The Girl Who Disappeared Twice" by Andrea Kane
Casey Woods runs her own private crime-solving team known as Forensic Instincts. Also on the team is Marc Devereaux, who is both a former FBI behavioural analyst (profiler) and a former Navy SEAL. The third member is Ryan McKay, the tech expert who is also a buff gym junkie. They are contacted by Family Court Judge Hope Willis, whose young daughter Krissy has been kidnapped. Hope wants them on the case because they can apparently cut all the corners that the local police and FBI cannot. However, this doesn't stop a majority of the novel from focusing on the bickering between the various teams over who does what.
As it happens, Hope's twin sister was kidnapped thirty-two years ago and was never recovered. Even more mysteriously, evidence points to Krissy getting into a car just like her mother's car, with a woman who looks just like her mother. Could the two cases be connected? You think? Rather than focusing on the blindingly obvious, the team are sidetracked by babysitter Ashley's affair with Hope's husband, Hope's father's ties to the mob, Hope's resentful ex-bench clerk and the various people who might be angry at Hope based on how she ruled in their case. Everybody must put aside their differences in a race against time to locate Krissy.
From the looks of things, Andrea Kane is a romance writer trying her hand at crime fiction without the romance angle. While I appreciate any author willing to jump out of their comfort zone and try something new, it's hard to get excited when the result is as flat, predictable and boring as this. Are we seriously supposed to be surprised by the identity of the kidnapper? Am I missing something? Was I supposed to be so caught up in the jurisdictional bickering between teams that I never managed to find the time to put two and two together? Because the majority of the novel seems to involve arguments or discussions between Forensic Instincts, the police and the FBI over who goes where and who questions who and so forth. I have no idea if the situation of having so many teams on the same case is portrayed accurately, but it hardly mattered, as it was so freaking dull and repetitive.
This extends to the relationship between Casey and Hutch, one of the FBI profilers. They get snotty with one another whenever they clash over jurisdictional issues. Unfortunately, their characters are so flat it's hard to get involved in their relationship plight to begin with. You'd think a romance writer would have a better handle on creating a believable relationship. However, the flat characterisation extends to pretty much everybody, with the possible exclusion of Hope Willis, who at least comes across as appropriately frazzled but plucky. I often had trouble telling Marc and Ryan apart. They were both hunks and brilliant at their respective skills, and that's about as much as I learnt about them. The other major problem is that we're always told rather than shown. We're frequently told how brilliant Casey, Marc and Ryan are, but it's rarely put into play. An extended sequence where they want to plant surveillance footage in a building (I won't say what kind in case of spoilers) fizzles out because breaking in proves to be really easy because "it's not Fort Knox".
As a minor quibble, the inclusion of psychic Claire just did not work for me. I'm bringing my own personal prejudices to the table, however, as I personally believe psychics are frauds. But there are so many other problems here that it ultimately doesn't matter much. The Girl Who Disappeared Twice is dull and predictable and will likely disappear from memory as soon as you've finished it.
As it happens, Hope's twin sister was kidnapped thirty-two years ago and was never recovered. Even more mysteriously, evidence points to Krissy getting into a car just like her mother's car, with a woman who looks just like her mother. Could the two cases be connected? You think? Rather than focusing on the blindingly obvious, the team are sidetracked by babysitter Ashley's affair with Hope's husband, Hope's father's ties to the mob, Hope's resentful ex-bench clerk and the various people who might be angry at Hope based on how she ruled in their case. Everybody must put aside their differences in a race against time to locate Krissy.
From the looks of things, Andrea Kane is a romance writer trying her hand at crime fiction without the romance angle. While I appreciate any author willing to jump out of their comfort zone and try something new, it's hard to get excited when the result is as flat, predictable and boring as this. Are we seriously supposed to be surprised by the identity of the kidnapper? Am I missing something? Was I supposed to be so caught up in the jurisdictional bickering between teams that I never managed to find the time to put two and two together? Because the majority of the novel seems to involve arguments or discussions between Forensic Instincts, the police and the FBI over who goes where and who questions who and so forth. I have no idea if the situation of having so many teams on the same case is portrayed accurately, but it hardly mattered, as it was so freaking dull and repetitive.
This extends to the relationship between Casey and Hutch, one of the FBI profilers. They get snotty with one another whenever they clash over jurisdictional issues. Unfortunately, their characters are so flat it's hard to get involved in their relationship plight to begin with. You'd think a romance writer would have a better handle on creating a believable relationship. However, the flat characterisation extends to pretty much everybody, with the possible exclusion of Hope Willis, who at least comes across as appropriately frazzled but plucky. I often had trouble telling Marc and Ryan apart. They were both hunks and brilliant at their respective skills, and that's about as much as I learnt about them. The other major problem is that we're always told rather than shown. We're frequently told how brilliant Casey, Marc and Ryan are, but it's rarely put into play. An extended sequence where they want to plant surveillance footage in a building (I won't say what kind in case of spoilers) fizzles out because breaking in proves to be really easy because "it's not Fort Knox".
As a minor quibble, the inclusion of psychic Claire just did not work for me. I'm bringing my own personal prejudices to the table, however, as I personally believe psychics are frauds. But there are so many other problems here that it ultimately doesn't matter much. The Girl Who Disappeared Twice is dull and predictable and will likely disappear from memory as soon as you've finished it.
Friday, April 5, 2013
"Eternally Yours" by Cameron Dokey
Mercedes Amberson is viewed by the other girls at Cooper Riding Academy as a poor little rich girl. She certainly feels alone, with parents who don't seem very interested in her. Her only friend is Andrea Burgess, who is poor, but has a loving family she misses.
What Mercy wants most of all is a boyfriend to call her own. She thinks she's found the one in Conner Egan, the lead singer of band Elysian Fields playing at the popular Night Owl club. Little does she know, Conner is actually a centuries-old vampire. He needs a young girl to pledge her undying love to him so that he may turn her into a vampire, allowing him to become mortal again. He thinks he's found the one in Mercy Amberson. It is up to Andrea to step in and save Mercedes from Conner's clutches.
Just when I think I've found the dumbest, most exasperating heroine in a novel ever, something always seems to come along and raise the bar even higher. The latest doozy is Mercedes "Mercy" Amberson, whose too-stupid-to-live behaviour really stretches patience. It is suggested that she is under some kind of spell that Conner has used to bend her to his will, but it did little to generate extra sympathy for her.
It also makes the plot confusing.
If Conner needs a young woman to tell him she'll love him forever and do anything to prove it so that he can turn her into a vampire and become mortal again himself - and has supernatural powers to hasten the wooing process along - why has it taken him over 200 years to find a wet blanket like Mercedes? He mentions he spent at least 100 of those years living like an animal because he was so angry at his vampire state, but that doesn't explain the other 100 years. What has he been doing in all that time? Tending to his garden? Penning the ten-thousand-or-so teen novels about vampire love that have been released in the last 20 years? He's certainly taken his sweet time. Maybe because only Mercedes was the only person in the last century who was enough of a dolt to fall for his bullshit. Who knows?
Conner believes that once he is mortal again, he can have whatever he wishes for the remainder of his life. What exactly is that? How would he achieve that? Will he gain a magic genie who grants those wishes once he's human? The novel doesn't explain why being mortal again is such an important goal for him, especially considering he has not been terribly proactive about the whole thing.
The character of Andrea Burgess is far more tolerable. She's plucky and strong-willed. Why on Earth she would expend so much energy and risk death several times to save a simpering moron like Mercedes is another question that remains unanswered.
Of course, I'm probably expecting too much from a 90s teen novel released when the market was being absolutely saturated by multiple clones. It doesn't stop me from hunting down every single one of them. And I do enjoy reading them. However, the ones involving sappy vampire love are generally the more dire of the lot, indicating that not a whole lot has changed since the early 90s vampire stuff and the Twilight-inspired dreck being released now.
What Mercy wants most of all is a boyfriend to call her own. She thinks she's found the one in Conner Egan, the lead singer of band Elysian Fields playing at the popular Night Owl club. Little does she know, Conner is actually a centuries-old vampire. He needs a young girl to pledge her undying love to him so that he may turn her into a vampire, allowing him to become mortal again. He thinks he's found the one in Mercy Amberson. It is up to Andrea to step in and save Mercedes from Conner's clutches.
Just when I think I've found the dumbest, most exasperating heroine in a novel ever, something always seems to come along and raise the bar even higher. The latest doozy is Mercedes "Mercy" Amberson, whose too-stupid-to-live behaviour really stretches patience. It is suggested that she is under some kind of spell that Conner has used to bend her to his will, but it did little to generate extra sympathy for her.
It also makes the plot confusing.
If Conner needs a young woman to tell him she'll love him forever and do anything to prove it so that he can turn her into a vampire and become mortal again himself - and has supernatural powers to hasten the wooing process along - why has it taken him over 200 years to find a wet blanket like Mercedes? He mentions he spent at least 100 of those years living like an animal because he was so angry at his vampire state, but that doesn't explain the other 100 years. What has he been doing in all that time? Tending to his garden? Penning the ten-thousand-or-so teen novels about vampire love that have been released in the last 20 years? He's certainly taken his sweet time. Maybe because only Mercedes was the only person in the last century who was enough of a dolt to fall for his bullshit. Who knows?
Conner believes that once he is mortal again, he can have whatever he wishes for the remainder of his life. What exactly is that? How would he achieve that? Will he gain a magic genie who grants those wishes once he's human? The novel doesn't explain why being mortal again is such an important goal for him, especially considering he has not been terribly proactive about the whole thing.
The character of Andrea Burgess is far more tolerable. She's plucky and strong-willed. Why on Earth she would expend so much energy and risk death several times to save a simpering moron like Mercedes is another question that remains unanswered.
Of course, I'm probably expecting too much from a 90s teen novel released when the market was being absolutely saturated by multiple clones. It doesn't stop me from hunting down every single one of them. And I do enjoy reading them. However, the ones involving sappy vampire love are generally the more dire of the lot, indicating that not a whole lot has changed since the early 90s vampire stuff and the Twilight-inspired dreck being released now.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
"Snakes & Ladders" by Sean Slater
Detective Jacob Striker is upset when he attends the scene of a suicide and realises he knows the victim, Mandy Gill. When he notices a camera set up outside the scene, and then has a tangle with a mysterious lurker, he is pretty sure it was not a suicide at all.
The investigation leads him and his partner, Detective Felicia Santos, to a mental health facility run by Dr. Erich Ostermann. Ostermann is a bit strange, and his family isn't much better. Striker is caught in a bureaucratic nightmare as he tries to obtain information from various sources.
As it happens, a shrink that Striker was seeing after the suicide of his wife is also a patient of Ostermann, after having a mental breakdown of her own. She has now gone missing, and Striker fears that she may be the next victim in the conspiracy he is uncovering.
Striker is contacted by the villian - who calls himself The Adder - who wants Striker to be his latest victim in a ritual he calls The Beautiful Escape.
Snakes & Ladders is an improvement over Slater's debut The Survivor, but still suffers from the fact that Striker is an arrogant asshole. Seriously, it is extremely difficult to spend all my time with a character who thinks he's always right and is God's gift to the world. The fact that he is almost always right kind of nips any suspense in the bud. Maybe if he was a bit more human and less of an over-confidant tool, there might be some drama and mystery over whether he is pursuing the right lead or not. Instead, Striker just marches around everywhere with the knowledge that all his hunches will play out exactly as he predicts.
Another thing I noticed was the fact that nearly every single chapter ends with some reference to where Striker and Santos are headed, or how long it will take them to get there, or that they were running out of time. It gets very repetitive.
The rhyme and reason behind the killer and their motives was much more interesting in this go-round, however. Instead of the inner turmoil of some turd who murders children (as found in The Survivor), we get a killer with a complex history and a motive that is believably derived from their circumstances. This believability kept me involved in the story whenever I was in danger of giving up because of Striker's assholery. The eventual revelation regarding the villian and their associates and their motives was clever and unexpected.
There was also a little more action thrown into the mix to keep things lively between the more routine aspects of the police procedural. Sure, Striker and Santos have to question a ridiculous amount of people, but there is at least a palpable sense of danger lurking throughout the proceedings, as our heroes have a couple of close encounters with death in the course of their investigation.
While the cat is let out of the bag a little early (with at least 100 pages left), Slater actually manages to up the suspense as the possible actions of his characters become increasingly unpredictable. It was nice to be genuinely interested in how things would play out.
A couple of inconsistencies:
The Adder invites Striker to play a game through a sinister e-mail. This is never revisited.
Striker spends the first quarter of the novel complaining about Larisa Logan's hard-nosed, obtrusive manner in his therapy sessions with her and that he doesn't like her all that much. After she goes missing, he's referring to her as a great friend who got him through the toughest period in his life.
It took me a few days to finish Snakes & Ladders - it was a little too long, the main character was very off-putting, and the "procedure" aspect of the police procedural was a bit too heavy, so I put the book down more often than I picked it up, but it was a more consistant effort than The Survivor, and I am not opposed to checking out another Striker novel. And considering how much I detest the guy, that's quite a feat!
The investigation leads him and his partner, Detective Felicia Santos, to a mental health facility run by Dr. Erich Ostermann. Ostermann is a bit strange, and his family isn't much better. Striker is caught in a bureaucratic nightmare as he tries to obtain information from various sources.
As it happens, a shrink that Striker was seeing after the suicide of his wife is also a patient of Ostermann, after having a mental breakdown of her own. She has now gone missing, and Striker fears that she may be the next victim in the conspiracy he is uncovering.
Striker is contacted by the villian - who calls himself The Adder - who wants Striker to be his latest victim in a ritual he calls The Beautiful Escape.
Snakes & Ladders is an improvement over Slater's debut The Survivor, but still suffers from the fact that Striker is an arrogant asshole. Seriously, it is extremely difficult to spend all my time with a character who thinks he's always right and is God's gift to the world. The fact that he is almost always right kind of nips any suspense in the bud. Maybe if he was a bit more human and less of an over-confidant tool, there might be some drama and mystery over whether he is pursuing the right lead or not. Instead, Striker just marches around everywhere with the knowledge that all his hunches will play out exactly as he predicts.
Another thing I noticed was the fact that nearly every single chapter ends with some reference to where Striker and Santos are headed, or how long it will take them to get there, or that they were running out of time. It gets very repetitive.
The rhyme and reason behind the killer and their motives was much more interesting in this go-round, however. Instead of the inner turmoil of some turd who murders children (as found in The Survivor), we get a killer with a complex history and a motive that is believably derived from their circumstances. This believability kept me involved in the story whenever I was in danger of giving up because of Striker's assholery. The eventual revelation regarding the villian and their associates and their motives was clever and unexpected.
There was also a little more action thrown into the mix to keep things lively between the more routine aspects of the police procedural. Sure, Striker and Santos have to question a ridiculous amount of people, but there is at least a palpable sense of danger lurking throughout the proceedings, as our heroes have a couple of close encounters with death in the course of their investigation.
While the cat is let out of the bag a little early (with at least 100 pages left), Slater actually manages to up the suspense as the possible actions of his characters become increasingly unpredictable. It was nice to be genuinely interested in how things would play out.
A couple of inconsistencies:
The Adder invites Striker to play a game through a sinister e-mail. This is never revisited.
Striker spends the first quarter of the novel complaining about Larisa Logan's hard-nosed, obtrusive manner in his therapy sessions with her and that he doesn't like her all that much. After she goes missing, he's referring to her as a great friend who got him through the toughest period in his life.
It took me a few days to finish Snakes & Ladders - it was a little too long, the main character was very off-putting, and the "procedure" aspect of the police procedural was a bit too heavy, so I put the book down more often than I picked it up, but it was a more consistant effort than The Survivor, and I am not opposed to checking out another Striker novel. And considering how much I detest the guy, that's quite a feat!
Monday, March 25, 2013
"No Sanctuary" by Richard Laymon
Rick agrees to go camping with his hot girlfriend, Bert (short for Bertha), despite the fact he's still haunted by a camping expedition from his youth. That adventure resulted in the rape and murder of his stepmother. His rampant paranoia threatens to derail their trip, but he appears to be willing to stick around after meeting a hot pair of young campers, Andrea and Bonnie.
Meanwhile, Gillian O'Neill is a rich girl with a strange hobby - she breaks into other peoples' homes while they are vacationing and makes herself at home. Unfortunately, the latest home she's kicking back at seems to belong to a sexual sadist. However, she's too busy trying to score with Jerry Dobbs to worry too much about the home owner's peccadilloes. She should - the home owner likes to kidnap, rape and murder young women and leave them in the woods - round about the same place Rick and Bert are going camping.
No Sanctuary was published in the same year as Richard Laymon's death, so I was holding out hope that this was a completed manuscript from shortly before he died, and not a cobbled-together patchwork released post-humously to capitalise on his popularity. As far as I can tell, No Sanctuary falls somewhere in the middle. While it is definitely more cohesive than The Lake, it still remains not much more than two separate stories loosely linked together in the last couple of chapters.
Rick and Bert's story largely revolves around Rick's belief that three male campers they encounter are actually dangerous rapists. They then run into a maniacal forest-bound preacher. Gillian's story has her hooking up with Jerry and then eventually tangling with the psychotic owner of the house she's broken into.
Unfortunately, it takes nearly 200 f***ing pages for anything interesting to happen.
No Sanctuary gets off to a great start with a chapter involving a young woman hiding under her bed whilst a dangerous intruder makes his way through her home. It then dies in the ass as Rick and Bert go camping, and Gillian and Jerry develop a relationship, with the author's usual fascination with nipples and breasts. I don't mind a generous dollop of sleaze in my thrillers or horror novels, so long as there's something else intriguing or sinister going on to underscore or maintain it. Here, we get nothing. Laymon seems to want to surprise us with who is actually the major threat towards Rick and Bert. But there's not enough going on for me to really want to know what danger they might be facing. When forest madman Angus eventually pops up, it was too little, too late. Even worse, it was a distraction from the serial killer I thought was the real villian of the piece.
There are some decent horror/thriller set-pieces in the last fifty pages or so. But that's really not good enough, especially considering the highly charged, page-turning epics Laymon has turned out in the past. No Sanctuary is a bomb, plain and simple. But I've always loved Laymon's novels and always will, and it's likely no amount of bombs is going to change that. I've still got books from his back catalogue on my shelf, so I'm more than optimistic they'll be better than this sloppy clunker.
Meanwhile, Gillian O'Neill is a rich girl with a strange hobby - she breaks into other peoples' homes while they are vacationing and makes herself at home. Unfortunately, the latest home she's kicking back at seems to belong to a sexual sadist. However, she's too busy trying to score with Jerry Dobbs to worry too much about the home owner's peccadilloes. She should - the home owner likes to kidnap, rape and murder young women and leave them in the woods - round about the same place Rick and Bert are going camping.
No Sanctuary was published in the same year as Richard Laymon's death, so I was holding out hope that this was a completed manuscript from shortly before he died, and not a cobbled-together patchwork released post-humously to capitalise on his popularity. As far as I can tell, No Sanctuary falls somewhere in the middle. While it is definitely more cohesive than The Lake, it still remains not much more than two separate stories loosely linked together in the last couple of chapters.
Rick and Bert's story largely revolves around Rick's belief that three male campers they encounter are actually dangerous rapists. They then run into a maniacal forest-bound preacher. Gillian's story has her hooking up with Jerry and then eventually tangling with the psychotic owner of the house she's broken into.
Unfortunately, it takes nearly 200 f***ing pages for anything interesting to happen.
No Sanctuary gets off to a great start with a chapter involving a young woman hiding under her bed whilst a dangerous intruder makes his way through her home. It then dies in the ass as Rick and Bert go camping, and Gillian and Jerry develop a relationship, with the author's usual fascination with nipples and breasts. I don't mind a generous dollop of sleaze in my thrillers or horror novels, so long as there's something else intriguing or sinister going on to underscore or maintain it. Here, we get nothing. Laymon seems to want to surprise us with who is actually the major threat towards Rick and Bert. But there's not enough going on for me to really want to know what danger they might be facing. When forest madman Angus eventually pops up, it was too little, too late. Even worse, it was a distraction from the serial killer I thought was the real villian of the piece.
There are some decent horror/thriller set-pieces in the last fifty pages or so. But that's really not good enough, especially considering the highly charged, page-turning epics Laymon has turned out in the past. No Sanctuary is a bomb, plain and simple. But I've always loved Laymon's novels and always will, and it's likely no amount of bombs is going to change that. I've still got books from his back catalogue on my shelf, so I'm more than optimistic they'll be better than this sloppy clunker.
"Broken Date" by R.L. Stine
Jamie is deeply in love with her boyfriend, Tom. She's got their whole life planned out for them. So she's understandably upset when she witnesses him shoot a jewelry store manager dead during an armed robbery. Instead of going to the police like any rational, intelligent person, she whines endlessly about how his actions have ruined her life. She also suspects that he's making threatening calls to her and following her around wherever she goes.
Broken Date was written quite early in Stine's teen horror career - 1988 to be exact! His work was generally of a higher quality back then, before he was churning out several books a month. Unfortunately, that is not the case here. Broken Date never really gets past the fact that Jamie never goes to the police after witnessing the crime. There probably wouldn't be a book if she had, but it was extremely difficult to believe that Jamie, who is presented as smart and together, would not do something so logical. When she then proceeds to act like an exasperating moron for the rest of the novel, it only makes things worse.
Like any of Stine's works, this one zips by at a decent pace, so you can almost forget how ridiculous it all is. Almost. The answer as to whether Tom really is the jewelry store robber is genuinely groan-inducing. It only serves to further paint Jamie as a complete idiot. Add to this the thin character development - we don't even learn the main characters' last names - and you have an entry in Stine's ouevre that is largely forgettable. If you have a date with this one, you're not missing much if you break it. Yeah, real original, Paul.
Broken Date was written quite early in Stine's teen horror career - 1988 to be exact! His work was generally of a higher quality back then, before he was churning out several books a month. Unfortunately, that is not the case here. Broken Date never really gets past the fact that Jamie never goes to the police after witnessing the crime. There probably wouldn't be a book if she had, but it was extremely difficult to believe that Jamie, who is presented as smart and together, would not do something so logical. When she then proceeds to act like an exasperating moron for the rest of the novel, it only makes things worse.
Like any of Stine's works, this one zips by at a decent pace, so you can almost forget how ridiculous it all is. Almost. The answer as to whether Tom really is the jewelry store robber is genuinely groan-inducing. It only serves to further paint Jamie as a complete idiot. Add to this the thin character development - we don't even learn the main characters' last names - and you have an entry in Stine's ouevre that is largely forgettable. If you have a date with this one, you're not missing much if you break it. Yeah, real original, Paul.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
"The Point Of Rescue" by Sophie Hannah
Sally Thorning is a wife and mother who is shocked when she sees a news report about the wife and child of Mark Bretherick being discovered dead. She's shocked because about a year earlier she had an affair whilst on holiday with somebody called Mark Bretherick - and it wasn't the guy she sees on her television screen.
Charlie Zailer has moved to another position after her previous case in which her boyfriend turned out to be a psychopathic rapist (she was never attacked, but she's bizarrely traumatised by it). But she's pulled back into this case when she comes across a note written by Sally regarding her suspicions.
Is Mark Bretherick who he says he is? Were his family murdered, or did his wife kill herself and their child? Is Sally being stalked? Charlie, her sort-of on-off boyfriend Simon Waterhouse and the various detectives must sort through the clues - including the Bretherick wife's diary - to find out what is going on.
The Point Of Rescue is both intriguing and exasperating. The plotting is excellent. Once all the strands were revealed and explained, I was very impressed. This one was extremely well put together. However, getting there can sometimes be a very drawn-out, roundabout experience. When so many characters are behaving so erratically that you need entire chapters to explain why they did what they did, or why they behaved a certain way, there's a problem. It means that the author is deliberately obscuring proceedings to keep the truth hidden just that little bit longer.
For example, this reaches its absolute nadir in a climactic chapter in which Simon Waterhouse reveals what he knows and how he figured it out. Does he come out and explain it in a concise, logical manner like anybody else in the real world? No, he doesn't. He goes off on continual tangents, keeps commenting on the traffic - anything the author can think of to draw it out that little bit longer. That's not suspense. That's cheating. It's infuriating. I was literally saying out loud: "for Christ's sake, get on with it!" It's unnecessary.
The relationship between Charlie and Simon is very tiresome. The fact that Charlie is acting like a victimised prima donna when she was NEVER ACTUALLY A VICTIM is really annoying. They have a sort-of romance that doesn't resemble any sort of romance that would exist in the real world. Even a quaint Mills & Boons heroine would roll her eyes at the way Charlie behaves around Simon. This is the sort of relationship that exists in fiction only because the author obviously thinks it's "unique". Um, no it's not. If anything, it just gets in the way. A lot of plot space gets taken up by their "relationship". Blech. Get on with your complex plot already.
This extends to the rest of the police team. Why are there so many of them? Why do we learn so many unnecessary things about them? Why is it so hard to tell all of them apart? Little Face and Hurting Distance were complex thrillers that didn't waste any words. This one wastes not just words, but entire chapters. Did the publisher instruct Hannah to inject more angst into the relationship between not just Charlie and Simon, but the entire police department?
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
One character move that took me out of the story and nearly made me throw the book across the room was when Sally managed to escape the house she was being held hostage in, but decided she didn't want to be found in her nightgown and have her secret affair be revealed, so she goes to extraordinary lengths, including injuring herself, to GO BACK IN THE HOUSE to clean up and get changed. What the f***? I suspect Hannah has never seen a horror movie before, because even the girls in horror films rarely do anything that f***ing stupid. Jeez. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.
END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER
Character-wise, The Point Of Rescue pretty much falls flat on its face. But the plot is great. Lots of little details dropped throughout the narrative that take on importance and relevance later in the book. Very intricately woven. I did enjoy it, but the huge, glaring flaws were highly evident, particularly because Hannah's previous works were so much tighter.
I started reading The Other Half Lives, her next novel, and had to put it down. After an okay start, it proceeded to waste nearly 30 pages on Charlie and Simon's engagement party. It's a very bulky novel, and I simply don't know if I can stand to slog through more than 500 pages of Charlie and Simon's ridiculous relationship troubles. Sigh.
Charlie Zailer has moved to another position after her previous case in which her boyfriend turned out to be a psychopathic rapist (she was never attacked, but she's bizarrely traumatised by it). But she's pulled back into this case when she comes across a note written by Sally regarding her suspicions.
Is Mark Bretherick who he says he is? Were his family murdered, or did his wife kill herself and their child? Is Sally being stalked? Charlie, her sort-of on-off boyfriend Simon Waterhouse and the various detectives must sort through the clues - including the Bretherick wife's diary - to find out what is going on.
The Point Of Rescue is both intriguing and exasperating. The plotting is excellent. Once all the strands were revealed and explained, I was very impressed. This one was extremely well put together. However, getting there can sometimes be a very drawn-out, roundabout experience. When so many characters are behaving so erratically that you need entire chapters to explain why they did what they did, or why they behaved a certain way, there's a problem. It means that the author is deliberately obscuring proceedings to keep the truth hidden just that little bit longer.
For example, this reaches its absolute nadir in a climactic chapter in which Simon Waterhouse reveals what he knows and how he figured it out. Does he come out and explain it in a concise, logical manner like anybody else in the real world? No, he doesn't. He goes off on continual tangents, keeps commenting on the traffic - anything the author can think of to draw it out that little bit longer. That's not suspense. That's cheating. It's infuriating. I was literally saying out loud: "for Christ's sake, get on with it!" It's unnecessary.
The relationship between Charlie and Simon is very tiresome. The fact that Charlie is acting like a victimised prima donna when she was NEVER ACTUALLY A VICTIM is really annoying. They have a sort-of romance that doesn't resemble any sort of romance that would exist in the real world. Even a quaint Mills & Boons heroine would roll her eyes at the way Charlie behaves around Simon. This is the sort of relationship that exists in fiction only because the author obviously thinks it's "unique". Um, no it's not. If anything, it just gets in the way. A lot of plot space gets taken up by their "relationship". Blech. Get on with your complex plot already.
This extends to the rest of the police team. Why are there so many of them? Why do we learn so many unnecessary things about them? Why is it so hard to tell all of them apart? Little Face and Hurting Distance were complex thrillers that didn't waste any words. This one wastes not just words, but entire chapters. Did the publisher instruct Hannah to inject more angst into the relationship between not just Charlie and Simon, but the entire police department?
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One character move that took me out of the story and nearly made me throw the book across the room was when Sally managed to escape the house she was being held hostage in, but decided she didn't want to be found in her nightgown and have her secret affair be revealed, so she goes to extraordinary lengths, including injuring herself, to GO BACK IN THE HOUSE to clean up and get changed. What the f***? I suspect Hannah has never seen a horror movie before, because even the girls in horror films rarely do anything that f***ing stupid. Jeez. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.
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Character-wise, The Point Of Rescue pretty much falls flat on its face. But the plot is great. Lots of little details dropped throughout the narrative that take on importance and relevance later in the book. Very intricately woven. I did enjoy it, but the huge, glaring flaws were highly evident, particularly because Hannah's previous works were so much tighter.
I started reading The Other Half Lives, her next novel, and had to put it down. After an okay start, it proceeded to waste nearly 30 pages on Charlie and Simon's engagement party. It's a very bulky novel, and I simply don't know if I can stand to slog through more than 500 pages of Charlie and Simon's ridiculous relationship troubles. Sigh.
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