Author: Geri Hosier
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!
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 for this review.
Please note that there are some serious formatting problems in the Kindle version of this novel. The formatting was better when the text was shrunk very small, but it was still a problem. For example, chapter 8 begins with the title, (which is simply 'Chapter 8') running on the same line as the last line of chapter 7, no page break, no paragraph break, not even a line break. The isn't the only example of a "run-on" chapter! And at 20% in I discovered a new make of helicopter: a Sirkovsky! Not to be confused with the much better-known Sikorsky...!
You know you don't actually have to give a brand name or a make (not for me anyway - I can do without them) - especially if you're not sure of it. You can just say 'helicopter'. I don't even care if you turn it into a verb and say that people were 'helicoptered' in. It's really not important to me as a reader what type of helicopter it was. There is no excuse in this electronic age, however, for formatting or spelling issues in a novel, not even in a so-called galley proof.
The inappropriate words I can understand to some extent in a first draft, but first drafts are certainly not ready for submission as advance reading copies! Given the general sloppiness of the writing overall, I have to take all this into account in this review. If an author cannot be bothered to make the effort - even to run a spell-checker once through their novel before submitting it for review - then why should I read it through once? I sound like an agent, don't I?! I'm not! I just care about writing.
Onto the story. Liv Paxton is the head of a London homicide team which is investigating a celebrity cell phone hacking scandal and some associated deaths. I guess someone dialed M for murder! The very first problem I ran into with this novel was the info dump problem. There was too much in the first few screens, with zero action. Take this sentence as an example: "She pushed her chin-length dark brown, red-hennaed hair behind her left ear and pushed her designer off-the-right-shoulder black lace dress, which was making her feel a little over-exposed, discreetly back up onto her shoulder." And this was at one percent in!
A sentence like this is way too packed. There may be readers who care about her hair being "hennaed" or her dress being designer. I don't. On the contrary, I find that kind of writing to be pretentious. As long as sentences like that are rare, I can read the novel containing them without them becoming an issue for me, but if I'm going to be encountering that kind of sentence frequently, it does not bode well for my rating of the novel! Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to play on, Macduff, and damned be him who first cries ‘Hold! enough!’.
I know how easy it is to miss something, or to let a grammar error or a misspelling go by. I'm trans-Atlantic myself, so I'm often finding myself in the position of wondering upon which side of "the pond" a given spelling belongs. Plus I tend to have 'dyslexic fingers' so while I know perfectly well how to spell the word, sometimes when I type fast, the letters don't always end up in the right order, which necessitates excessive editing and re-reading. I should just learn to type properly!
What all this means for those of us who have such problems, or aren't good at spelling, or grammar, or who might actually be dyslexic or something along those lines, is that we have to work that much harder! And whilst we do have spell-checkers, they can only tell us if the spelling is correct, not if it's the correct spelling for the way the word is used, and certainly not if it's the correct use of that word! Microsoft's grammar checker in Word is useless. I detest and loathe Microsoft, so I don't use their products at home. I run Ubuntu Linux on my computer, and use Soft Office, which is perfectly fine, but which offers no advantage in the areas I've mentioned. It does have a good spell-checker, however, for which I am really grateful (and definitely not 'greatful'!).
The only way to get a leg-up here is to read lots of well-written material, and as much as I disdain the so-called classics, they are well-written. That doesn't mean we should write all our novels like Jane Austen, for example, wrote hers, but we can learn some style from those people. We can learn how to tell a story, and from the really good ones, we can learn how not to jam up the first few pages with excessive description.
But back to the novel. The more I read of this, the less I felt I wanted to read of it. The story isn't outright bad, but it's not that great either, and the technical problems with the text became worse. There was an increasing number of spelling errors and typos, for example where the 's' from the start of word two is accidentally tagged onto the tail of word one instead. At one point there was the non-word Causcasians. There were variations on the word 'lairy' - which is a word, but which appears to be used in the wrong context here - and this was confusing. I'm wondering if 'hairy' was what was intended, but given the other issues with formatting and spelling, I have no idea whether it's right or wrong, whether it was intended or not, or whether it was supposed to be 'hairy' and not 'lairy'. In short, I could not trust the author here because of too many issues elsewhere! These are just a few examples.
The old excuse that this is a "galley proof" doesn't cut it today. Not for me it doesn't. There's no excuse at all for bad formatting or for spelling errors in an era where novels are written on computers and all word processors have a spell checker. Had the novel been more engrossing, I might have been distracted enough that I wouldn't get the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard feeling whenever I encountered one of these, but when the story drags, that's when you really notice the potholes in the road. I didn't like the main character Liv, or her best friend, newspaper tycoon Louise. Neither of them seemed to act their age and they were both snobs.
They also had some weird ideas about gender roles, too: for example, they're all for equality - head cop, head of newspaper, which is perfectly fine, but then Liv insists upon a guy who is 'masculine', and she defines that by a guy who opens doors for her and pulls out a chair for her when they go to dinner! Seriously? You can't have it both ways. Either the genders are equal (at least in intent) or they're not. If you're not equal, you can be treated "like a woman" (whatever antique notion that satisfies) and have your coat draped over your shoulders for you as you leave, and the door opened for you as you arrive, and your seat pulled out for you as you go to dinner. If you're equal, then you can pull out your own chair! Unless we're going to take turns pulling out chairs and opening doors. That's equality! What's Liv going to ask for next - to have her stool pulled out by a strong, masculine man?!
The biggest problem from a reading enjoyment perspective was that all this 'James Bond' style futzing around with expensive clothes, flash cars, dallying with a romance, and dog's dinners, was that it all-too-frequently put the actual story on a back burner. The reason I selected this novel was that I wanted to read the detective story. If I'd wanted a romance to dominate the story I'd have picked up a romance (which is unlikely, but it has happened!). Instead of getting on with the story here, I found it often tossed into the back seat in favor of pursuing the budding relationship between Liv and Mr Perfect, who was a decorated soldier and very much a Mary Sue. I had no interest in him or in their romance. Yes, I was interested in the potential link between him serving in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and there being two hundred million pounds' (sterling) worth of heroin going missing there, and it would have been great had it turned out that he was behind it all, but having had the thankless task of wading through the swampy waters of the first 25% of this, I really had no energy and no interest in wading any more even to get to the bottom of that mystery. I can't honestly and in good conscience rate this novel a worthy read.
