Author: Mike Bond
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
Rating: WARTY!
I could not get into this at all. I felt nothing drawing me in and felt no interest in or warmth towards the characters. The story is a mess. I had no idea where it was going.
The blurb felt a bit off to me, but it made it sound interesting enough, yet when I began to actually read this, the writing wasn't engaging at all, and it took far too long to bring in the female interest. By the time she showed up I had lost interest to such an extent that she wasn't enough to regain it for me.
It begins with some guys crossing a raging river in Tibet? Nepal? I don't know. One of them nearly falls in but he doesn't. Then they continue the journey, teaming-up with some locals carrying either salt or assault rifles, and it turns out it's actually a nuclear bomb trigger, and they fall into the river, and suddenly the other guys want to kill them, but they escape. In order to evade pursuit they have to split up, then this one guy is chased by a leopard, and at this point I was rooting for the leopard. At least she had motivation and was interesting.
Here's the problem - these guys are transporting arms, why would they want some hippie climbers coming along with them? It made no sense whatsoever that they would ask other people, outsiders, to travel with them. I think this farcical set-up was one of the main reasons why this novel lost credibility for me, and it never regained it.
Later there's shooting outside an embassy and more endless running, and I'm so bored by this time that even a shoot-out didn't engage my interest. It's around this same time that I find I'm skimming sentences, then paragraphs, then pages trying to find something which could hold my interest.
The formatting for the Kindle was pathetic and this didn't help endear me to the novel. When I was half-way through, the Kindle said I had three minutes left to read in the book, which is patent nonsense, although I admit that skimming screens probably screwed it up, but even when I slowed down and began reading properly again, it didn't change the timer. Weird. Yeah, I know this is an ARC, but this isn't an age where metal type has to be set by hand in a tray. In a world of electronic writing, and templates, and automated formatting, there really is no excuse whatsoever for sub-standard ARCs.
Needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, I gave up on it. It was too disorganized, poorly plotted, limply depicted, and offering no reason to get interested in the story or the characters. It wasn't even trying to lure me in. I couldn't care are about any of these people because I was never given reason to. They just didn't engage me. It seemed like it was far more a surfeit of set action pieces flimsily linked with a really vague attempt at a narrative rather than an actual and complete story.
It reminded me of exchange Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson had during one academy awards show, when Stiller was giving grief to Wilson about his (then recent)movie Behind Enemy Lines where the entire movie is about Wilson running and being shot at to no purpose or end, and that was this novel - highly improbable, impossible to appreciate, endless running and unlikely garnering or one injury after another, none of which slowed down the runner. Why would anyone be interested in reading this same thing over and over again with nothing else happening and no reason offered to care about who it happened to? I wasn't.
