Author: Laura Griffin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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.
Andrea Finch is a cop who, while in the middle of being dumped by boyfriend named Nick, shoots a guy in a restaurant. The guy had come into the kitchen to threaten his girlfriend with an automatic and Andrea, good cop that she is, got suspicious of his demeanor, and followed him in there. Now she's on leave pending an inquiry into the shooting, but a Senator's daughter, Julia Kirby, has been killed in a university bombing, and it looks like Andrea's going to be pulled back in, one way or another. I started liking this novel almost right away, but it slowly became bogged down by a really bad romance and by too much rambling in the text, unrelated to moving the story along. It went DNR at 63%. Yeah, I know most people call that DNF, but trust me, this wasn't going to be resuscitated.
I ran into two problems in the first twelve pages. They were relatively minor problems, but nonetheless important. The first is that the author, in her evident need to get her weapons chops down on paper asap, has the bomber check his gun right before he gets out of the van and triggers the bomb via his cell phone. I'm not sure why he even needed a gun, but the fact is that the weapon never leaves his pocket, so I'm lost as to how it was that he 'checked his weapon' in any meaningful way. He didn’t take it out to verify that it was loaded and that a round was chambered, so this struck me as the writer merely saying, "Hey, I know lots about this weapon, check out my research" without contributing anything towards moving the story along. It took me out of suspension of disbelief for a minute there.
The other problem, and this is worse in my opinion, was another instance of a female writer reducing a female character to nothing more than youth and beauty, as though nothing else matters. Julia Kirby is described as "beautiful" and "just eighteen years old". I'm sorry but who cares? What difference do her looks and age make? Would her death have been just fine if she'd been forty-five, and plain looking? What if she had been sixty, and gray haired? Would it have been okay then? I simply don't get why the writer chose to put in that particular description. It's demeaning for anyone to write it when it has nothing to do with the story at hand, and it's particularly obnoxious coming from a female author.
I can see the value of specifying that she was a Senator's daughter - not because such a child is more important than, say, the corner mechanic's daughter, but because the Senator might have a role to play in the novel by coming down on the police department to solve this crime. Her age and looks, however, contribute nothing save to tell all women that unless you're young and beautiful, you ain't nuthin'. What’s that song from the 1933 movie Roman Scandals: keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved? To see this coming from a female author's keyboard saddens me greatly.
That aside, I initially warmed to this novel quickly, and I liked the way Finch was depicted until I found out on page 233 that she's actually a complete moron. Until then, the trope romance aside, she was definitely someone I could have warmed to, and about whom I did want to read more to begin with. The problem was that I've traveled this route before only to discover that the woman morphs into a complete wuss of male appendage down the road, and you discover you're not on the highway, but in a cul-de-sac.
I got strong feelings of déjà vu when the unfortunately de rigeur male interest surfaced in the form of Jon North. He's a man whom Finch admits she would "have a hard time refusing", and who inappropriately cups her face and runs his thumb over her cut lip feigning concern before roughly kissing her as though he honestly doesn't give a damn about her lip. Barf.
I'm sorry but this is sickening, and it started going precisely the way I feared: the tough female main character turning to Jell-O® under the dominating gaze of the alpha male. It’s pathetic, and it’s what turned this novel sour when I was sincerely hoping it would grow into something sweet up until that point. It’s not like there was anything on the other side of this equation, either: North thinks of Finch in purely carnal terms, lusting after her hot bod, without giving a damn about what kind of an actual person she might or might not be. Frankly, it’s juvenile.
Whenever North thinks of Finch, it’s about her "lithe body" and "her sensual mouth", and "the way she'd tasted" like she's some kind of a burger, and he's sixteen years old. His reaction to her at one point when she visits him, is "either get her out or get her in bed". These are the only two options he can envisage. What a charmer he is. His behavior is precisely what's missing from Jeffery Deaver's James Bond reboot that I negatively reviewed. It would have been at home there (assuming Deaver was really doing what was claimed: emulating Fleming); it’s definitely not appropriate here because it renders the whole novel into a cheap and nasty florid romance.
On the positive side, there's no ridiculous pseudo-macho main male character name in evidence here. Sadly, that's all North has going for him, but even that's trampled under the repeated trope of sidelong glances and thudding hearts, with North being very quickly depicted as "impressively ripped". Finch was shown as dating a guy (for a month) who had a slight stomach paunch (this is the guy who breaks up with her at the start), yet now she's prematurely hot for a buff bod?
If the author had written this the opposite way around - being dumped by, or better yet, dumping the chiseled guy; then finding a slightly out-of-shape FBI agent appealing for reasons other than his body, it would have been new and fresh, and it would have made for a far better story, but we have to travel trope trail instead. This really disappointed me, because it took me out of the story with the distraction of wondering if there wasn't some wish-fulfillment going on here in the stead of serious story-telling. Quite clearly the non-ripped dude from the opening chapters was nothing more than a cheap throw-away to try and give Finch some undeserved cred., as though we're too dumb to see through a cheap ploy like that. Way to insult your readers!
I mentioned earlier that Finch proves herself to be a moron, so how's that, exactly? Well at the start of this one chapter she effectively breaks into North's home. Yeah, the door is unlatched, so technically it’s not breaking and entering, but she does enter when she's not expected by the host, and she enters without permission. It's in the early morning in the dark, and she blithely walks in without calling out to let North know she's there. Meanwhile, he's fast asleep with a gun by his bed. Seriously? How stupid, exactly, are these people? They don't lock and bolt their doors (the author keeps referring to doors as 'latched' or 'unlatched', like they don’t even have locks or bolts on them anyway!). These people are investigating a terrorist who has murdered people and threatened Finch's life, yet she cluelessly wanders unannounced into North's home where he could have shot her dead.
It was at this point that I decided that Le Stupide was too strong with this one, and I called, "Check please; I'm outta here!" It’s a real shame, too, because this novel had much potential to be really good. It had me hooked for a good fifty percent of the way through despite some issues (notably with the romance), but at this point it became too stupid to live. It had been on the skids since about the half-way point, forcing me to skim a page or two here and there, particularly the rambling chats between the two main protagonists where they had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot and were no more than juvenile flirting and pointless conversation unrelated to moving anything along. So at 63% in, I’d had enough of the stop-start action, and I no longer had any faith at all that the remaining third of this novel would be capable of digging itself out of the hole within which it had become so firmly entrenched.
