Author: Leslie A. Smith aka Leslie Kelly
Publisher: LK Books
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story.
This is Book 1 of the 'Veronica Sloan' series. I don’t know if Leslie Smith got married and decided to change her name, or got divorced and did likewise, or just wanted to separate her action-adventure name from her romance novels, but if it was the latter, it doesn’t seem to have worked since Don't Look Away is out under both her names! The 'Smith' attributed version is copyrighted to the Kelly name. I'm not sure what the wisdom or even the point is of that, but there you have it!
The novel is well-written apart from a minor quirk here and there, like the name 'Carr' misspelled as 'car' on P202. But this is a proof copy, so maybe these things are all ironed out in the press version. The writing is to the point, moving the tale, and not overly dramatic or underly so. There is a small but slightly disturbing amount of genderism going on, but not enough to turn my stomach. I found it amusing that she uses the phrase "out in Texas" rather than "down in Texas". The novel is some 338 pages, but it’s spaced very generously; if it were more compact it would be significantly shorter. The spacing reminds me of how I did Saurus before I became fully clued-in to the idiosyncrasies of word-processor formatting. It just goes to show that page count really doesn't convey diddly without also knowing the spacing and font details; that's why I quit including a page count in my reviews. It’s really irrelevant in this age of ebooks, anyway.
Set in the second quarter of the 21st century, in Washington DC, this is, in some ways, a post-apocalyptic story. The apocalypse was some (only vaguely described) terrorist attack of such magnitude that it devastated the mall area of DC, killed the president, and destroyed the White House. The attack changed things even more significantly than the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon did, so the new bookmark is 10/20, not 9/11. I'm not sure why Smith/Kelly went there when the overall story would have worked just fine had it been set in 2013.
At around the time of the bombings, there was a program to 'chip' people - that is to embed in a person's skin a microchip which would contain basic data about that person. This technology is available now, and I can see it becoming wide-spread in the future. I know a lot of people reject this 'big brother' idea, but if you have nothing to hide you should have nothing to snide. I don’t see the logic to a society that will chip pets but not children, and then whine when children are abducted and we can't find them. Do we value our vehicles more than children so that we will LoJack a car and then reject that same security for a child? I guess so. We obviously believe strongly in lighting car dealerships far more brilliantly at night than we'll ever light up residential neighborhoods. That says a lot about American values, doesn’t it?
Police detective Veronica Sloan and her partner Mark Daniels are called to a murder in the basement of the under-construction White House. The reason Ronnie is called is because she's in the 'Optical' squad (Smith/Kelly doesn't know how to coin a good acronym! The squad is Optical Evidence Program Investigative Squad, or O.E.P.I.S. as she writes it - pronounced, presumably, E-piss? I think it needs a better name!). It's an elite group of law-enforcement officers spread across the country who have high security clearance, specialized training, and a camera embedded in their head, tied to their optic nerve. I guess it's a bit like Kiera Cameron's rig in Continuum. The reason Ronnie is called in is that victim is also an OEPIS member. You might think a crime like this would be easy to solve, even one so gruesome that her body is cut to pieces, quite literally. Unfortunately, the head containing the camera is, in her case, missing!
It seemed to me from the start that there was a big flaw in this system. It evidently can detect when life is terminated, but no-one thought to have it set up to send an encrypted burst-transmission of data recorded since the last archiving, to a secure location, if the bearer is dying. If it had, they would have a lot more chance of figuring this out. As it is, with the head gone, they’re screwed in every way but pleasant. I'm also a bit surprised at the evident reticence of Ronnie and her partner to actually go look at Leanne's previously archived material to see what she was doing and with whom she was involved. I would have thought that would be the first priority, lacking other evidence. The murder took place during a festival and there were some 55,000 people in the mall at the time, so their potential suspect pool is overwhelmingly huge!
Oh, and someone needs to clue Smith/Kelly in that it's not "rocket to air missiles"! I think she means surface-to-air. Along that same line of thinking, the term 'optical camera' is a tautology, but these minor flaws aside, I can see myself wanting to read a sequel to this if the novel continues to be a decent read as it has shown itself to be so far. Admittedly some of my complaints are no more than pet peeves, but some are issues with the writing of the novel, and it’s appropriate to address them because my blog isn’t just about reading and reviewing, it’s about the writing process and the English language, and I've begun to realize that while I do touch on this often, I don't spend anywhere near enough time on discussing those things in relation to what I'm reading.One thing which piqued my interest was Smith/Kelly's use of "utilizing" (or "utilize(d)"). I noticed this three times in the space of a few pages on p74, p79, p83. It was sufficiently distracting that I did a search for it then, purely out of curiosity! I never would have been able to do this were this a real book rather than a virtual ebook! My search pulled these terms up on p154, p237, p297, p328, which isn't that often I suppose, but they did jump out at me because that words bothers me!
Now obviously this is Smith/Kelly's novel, and it's entirely up to her how she writes it and which words she chooses, but as for me, I've never liked that word. It seems...what’s the word? Pretentious? Officious? Overblown? I've never been a fan of using a more complex word when a simpler one will suffice, unless of course, you're going for some particular effect, so each time I read one of those uses, I found myself distracted from the text, wondering what was wrong with substituting "using" or "making use of." Maybe no one else will notice, and it’s not a criticism of this novel but definitely a criticism of writing in general!
Having said all that, there are some things specific to this novel. One of these is the seemingly contradictory text at one point where Smith/Kelly writes that Ronnie "...wanted the darkness", but immediately afterwards has her switch on her flashlight! That made no sense to me and stuck out like a sore thumb. Another thing which perked-up my interest is where Smith/Kelly says of the perp, "...he'd covered his tracks." The big allusion here is to the gender of the perp. I don’t know if she gave this away on purpose, or was just using unfortunately gender-laden terminology, but that's not what really interested me. The way this is written, it's impossible to tell if these are thoughts that Ronnie is entertaining, or if it's just the way Smith/Kelly wrote it. If the latter is the case, then was it deliberate, or merely thoughtless? Sneaky or sloppy? I don’t know. If it was the former, does it betray that female hero Ronnie is genderist in her thinking?!
Back to the story! There's a big effort at a red-herring with a character called Bailey! Should I bite? Is it a red-herring? It’s hard to say! Right around this time is when Ronnie herself is attacked by the perp, who is returning the vic's head to the scene of the crime, and runs into Ronnie in the process. She's in the basement by herself, of course. We've been treated to a few of the perp's thoughts, but not many. "He" seems conflicted about taking the head. What bothers me about this particular event is that no one seems to realize that their 55,000 suspect pool has now been drastically narrowed. Clearly, this can only have been done by someone who has access to the site, able to pass through all the security, and doing so while carrying a victim's head in some sort of container, yet none of the investigating officers pick up on this: that he had to get the head out of there on day one, and then get it back in there that day he attacked Ronnie. This is a huge clue. All Ronnie wonders is if there is a tunnel still in use - one which was not sealed and filled in after the 10/20 attacks. Is that the case?
Because of the attack on Ronnie (which incapacitates her to unconsciouness for eight straight hours!), Jeremy Sykes shows up. He's a very competitive OEPIS trainee, with whom Ronnie locked horns repeatedly. She decided never to pursue that relationship, but she has a sadly adolescent crush on him which completely stalls the story for me. There's a hugely annoying amount of 'Ronnie instadore' over Jeremy, which really turned me off because instead of getting on with the investigation which is what I'm interested in, many more than half her thoughts are now focused on Jeremy instead of on solving the murder. And there's been another murder - of another OEPIS member - in Philadelphia! But this swooning by Ronnie over Jeremy is nauseating, frankly and IMO it rather belittles and demeans her.
The set-up for the second murder is really cheesy since Smith/Kelly goes out of her way to describe how sugary the relationship is between the new vic and his wife. To me, a murder isn’t somehow worse because the victim was in a beautiful relationship; all murders are awful. The second murder is also rendered absurdist with the description of the discovery of the second victim's head and how it made the girl (who was coming in to work) panic and run in front of a garbage truck. How abusively genderist is that? If the employee was a guy, would he have screamed and ran?! And if this girl was so badly injured after this, then how can the police possibly know the circumstances of how she discovered the body?! That struck me as a bit thoughtless. This scene seemed to offer a big clue indicating that the victim was being watched for some time - at least a couple of weeks and perhaps more - before the perp struck, but nothing is made of this at all. Was the victim being watched using his own downloaded video? Was this crime committed by someone who is high-up in the OEPIS hierarchy?
We truly enter tropesville when Ronnie proves how super-tough and dedicated she is by checking herself out of the hospital against medical advice. I have a feeling that in the real world her supervisor would have something seriously unpleasant to say about an officer who tried to do that, especially when there's another competent OEPIS officer now on the case. How many times do we see this trope in in books, and on TV and in movies: the overworked cop cliché, working super-extra-hard and going without sleep, cases piling up? I am not impressed by that. It just annoys me.
Once Ronnie's old OEPIS nemesis Jeremy came back into the picture - as we knew he would, of course! - I also got the overwhelming feeling that her partner Mark Daniels isn’t going to survive this novel. Was I right? You'll have to read it to find out! Recall that this is the start of a series, so how is it going to proceed? Is the next volume going to be Ronnie and Mark again with no Jeremy in the picture? I doubt it. Not with the way Smith/Kelly gushes about how hot Ronnie is for Jeremy. Or is Mark going to be quietly eliminated, to provide yet more amped-up angst, and allow Jeremy to slide into his place somehow? It's pretty obvious that if anyone is killed off it's not going to be Jeremy!
An out of left field surprise is that Mark is revealed to be a OEPIS member. I either missed this earlier in the text, or it really is out of left field, because I don’t remember this being broached at all! He's not mentioned in connection with the training "out in Texas"! Maybe I'm wrong and I just missed it.
There's a weak spot (at least that's how it looks to me) when Smith/Kelly has a barcode reader read the RFID chip embedded in (Ronnie's mentor) Doctor Tate's arm! Surely that should be a RFID reader and not a barcode reader? It gets worse as Ronnie and Jeremy are both asked to put their palm onto the palm reader so they can be granted access to the facilities in pursuit of their investigation. My question here is: how does the system know which of them is putting their palm on the reader? Does it already have their fignerprints and can figure it out? Maybe, but it bothers me a bit that this isn’t explained.
The pair of them is required to go to Tate's lab to look at the implanted cameras which were recovered from both victims. We get a bit of the movie Disclosure here. If you saw that movie you'll recall the absurd 3D database which Michael Crichton cluelessly had some people explore. In the movie, they excused his cluelessness by explaining that this was just a proof-of-concept thing: that in real life, it would be used for other more practical purposes.
Smith/Kelly is wiser than Crichton, because she employs it much more realistically. It still seems like overkill to me, but it would look good in a movie! In the lab, they meet Eileen Cavanaugh - Doctor Tate's assistant - and are treated to a firm handshake, James Bond style! I think this 'firm-handshake tells you a lot about a person' trope is pure bullshit, but whatever. Eileen is, of course, "drop-dead gorgeous" and has "ample curves". That bothered me. It’s already hard enough to get women into science and engineering. Are we aiming to further dissuade them by implying that you'll really only have standing there if you're hot, or if you're geeky (which is the other clichéd extreme)? I'd rather some characters were just everyday, regular people like they are in real life! There seems to me to be no reason at all to amp up the Cavanaugh character given that it goes nowhere.
Okay! I think that's enough secrets to give away! Yeah, there were some issues with this novel, and the ending was a bit too mundane for me given the great build-up to it, but the story-telling in general was really good, and I will look forward to the sequel - which is sneakily set-up at the end, and perhaps does promise something rather more along the lines of what I'd been hoping for. So definitely a worthy read! After reading a few disasters lately, its so good to finally have the opportunity to read an ebook that really was a pleasure.
