Author: Alex Kava
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!
Narrated ably by Eby - Tania Eby that is - although her delivery isn't anything to write home about. She might do better with better material.
Damaged is a really apt title for this disaster of a novel. Brain-Damaged might be a better one. You know how writers are always lectured to start at the beginning - i.e. start where the action (aka story) starts? Kava ignores that and gets published anyway, which just goes to prove that anyone who writes rules about how you should write (and not a one of those rule-writers is anyone you ever heard of!) is full of it, period! It's not your writing style that matters; it's who you know and what you can get away with. Keep that in mind now we can all self-publish.
This is my first Alex Kava, and also my last. I'm not impressed at all. She is one of the most procrastinating and plodding writers I've ever read in my life. She simply cannot get this story started. She writes on and on and on for chapter after chapter with not a thing happening. Her digressions are all over the place and not a one of them moves the story forwards. Perhaps she has a plan to tie them all up in a neat bow at the end, but at this point I really don't care, because I'm so sick of her tedious drunken rambling.
By chapter nine, we still didn't even have the body and the investigator in the same state, let alone the same room. Kava starts the first two chapters with rambling nonsense about how the body is discovered - not a crossed 't' or a dotted 'i' of which is relevant. It's a cut-up body in a cooler! So we couldn't start with the main character opening it up? Nope, we had to start with an entire chapter rambling mindlessly about a female newbie in the coastguard having to prove herself by showing how idiotic she was that she went down to recover a floating cooler in rough seas where no lives were at stake. I sincerely hope our coastguard is smarter than this and our women in the coast-guard service are not this pathetic. And what was the point of this chapter - other than to lecture us about the thing we already know: women have to play by different rules, that is? There was none. I was nauseated, but it wasn't from the rough seas.
So do we get right to it in chapter two? Nope! In chapter two we get the so-tired-that-it's-sawing logs cliché of an overworked criminal profiler who has other issues, too. She can't sleep. She's in trouble with her boss. She's a mess. Oh, and she has a dog! So having begun with the overworked cliché of an overworked cliché, will we see a concluding cliché of her sleeping soundly? I honestly couldn't care less about her. At one point she ends up in a helicopter with the coastguard rescuing some idiot off a wrecked boat for absolutely no reason whatsoever that I could see. Maybe there was a sentence in one of those tiresome tracks which I skipped which explained it, but I had no interest whatsoever in skipping back through ninety-nine tracks per disk (yes, it was one of those) on the off chance that I could locate this one pertinent fact in a monotonous miasma of irrelevancy.
I am rating this warty before I finish it because after three disks (of a total of five), I see no merit in it at all, nor any sign of any. The only reason I was likely to finish it was that I didn't yet have my replacement audio-book, so I thought I might as well see if this was ever going anywhere remotely in sight of an intelligent conclusion, but I couldn't even manage that, because I became so tired of listening to it gong nowhere. This novel is definitely warty!
