(Barnes and Noble's website search engine doesn't seem to get the fact that if you type in title "Dead Drop" you really don't want titles like "Drop Dead"! No wonder they're losing out to Amazon!)
Author: Jesse Miles
Publisher: Robert Gordon Peoples (no website found)
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. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!
I had some really mixed feelings about this and wavered between a negative and a positive rating overall. Even as I sat down to work through my first draft of the review, I felt I was going to go positive in the hope that a new writer will season and improve on these scores as experience (and more reviews!) weigh in.
In the end I couldn't bring myself to rate this positively because of the gratuitous treatment of women in it which irritated more and more as I re-read what I'd written and considered it against the overall story. It was when I realized that I was in danger of having to make excuses for the writing by trying to argue that the overall story was good, that I knew that I had to change my rating, or take the road marked "Hypocrisy This Way"!
This is part of the 'Jack Salvo' private investigator series, of which I've read no others - I believe this is the first, although it feels like it's further along than that from the way it's written - it feels like we're starting in the middle of something rather than at the outset.
The blurb sounded intriguing, but it goes completely against my self-imposed ban on reading novels of any kind in which there's a main character named 'Jack' since that name is so over-used and is so clichéd that it almost makes me physically sick. I end-up wanting to name these characters Jack-Ass. And "Jack Salvo"? Seriously? Please, since this is evidently a brand-new series, can we not follow the road less traveled?!
Having said that, the story itself was good overall. In general it was well-written (apart from, for example, the use of the non-word "Thusly" on page 55!), it moved quickly, and was interesting, thoughtful for the most part, with some mystery and not too much machismo. The plot was believable and the main character's actions were also (for the most part) - except for the part where every woman no matter what her age or circumstances, seems ready to lie down and open her legs for Jack.
On the downside, there was rampant objectification of women, and some age-ism going on here and there, which I didn’t appreciate at all. I found myself trying to gage whether there was a favorable balance between sheer inappropriateness and decent story-telling, although a writer ought never to put their readers in that position! In the end I concluded that it was too much to let slide.
A problem here is one I have with a lot of books in that it’s told from first person perspective (Salvo's of course), which is also pretty much a cardinal rule for hard-bitten private dick stories, but that doesn’t mean that the PI actually has to be a dick. Plus it can be difficult in this case to be sure what is the character's thinking and what is the author's, which is creepy at best.
I know it’s all-but de rigeur to have this sort of predatory ogling of women in such a "hard-bitten and cynical" genre of novel, but this isn't the 1950's. Just because it's traditional doesn't mean we have to perpetuate it. Is there no one out there who can ditch convention and strike out on their own trail - one which has a PI story which isn't written in 1PoV and main character who doesn’t objectify or prey on women, no matter how indirectly?
The age-ism eared its ugly head on page 43 where Salvo first meets Wendy Storm, a fifty-year-old woman who may have some information which will help his investigation. I'm not remotely convinced that her age has to do with anything in this story, but it’s employed to generate this charming observation: "Thirty years and thirty pounds ago, she would have stopped traffic." Is that supposed to endear me to the main character, that this woman is fifty and somewhat overweight and is therefore somehow second-rate? It doesn’t. It makes me think Jack-Ass Salvo is a low-life, and it makes me dislike him immensely.
I know it flies in the face of Hollywood predilection (or predation), but you know what? There’s nothing wrong with older women (or older men). Anyone who is deluded enough to honestly think there is, needs psychiatric attention. There was no need at all for that observation, and it bothers me that this author seems to think, as evidenced by too much of what he writes here that involves on women, that the only really important thing is her looks.
That stinks regally, and we see it repeatedly expressed in Salvo's attitude towards most every woman he encounters, right from the start of the book. All he thinks about when he meets a woman is the superficial: how attractive or unattractive she is, how hot she is, how skimpily or provocatively dressed she is. It’s tiresome. Frankly, it’s pathetic and detracts from the power that this character could have, were he written better. The irony here is that Salvo is, believe it or not, a philosophy teacher. This leads me to believe that he must be also schizophrenic, to be a student of philosophy on one hand and to objectify women to an obnoxious extent on the other. I can't reconcile these things adequately!
Fortunately (for my continuing reading this and for my rating of it), although those kinds of references were common where women were "in play" in this story, they were thinly-spread through material because there were a lot of other things going on, most of which were good, and/or interesting, and/or intriguing. To be fair, there were occasions where women were portrayed positively: smart, capable, brave. The problem with that, though, was that the way these things were represented was as though they were something special - as though most women don't have these qualities, so let's be glad that this particular one does. Now maybe I got off to a bad start, having my perception tainted by his first interaction with a couple of women in the first few pages, but I wasn't the one who tainted that perception.
Some of the references were a bit off, too. For example, in one instance, Salvo makes the sarcastic observation that he could be the next Clint Eastwood (page 65), but Clint Eastwood hasn’t been a real movie star for decades. Making a reference like that makes the lead character seem like he's fifty or sixty, but he isn’t. He's younger than that and should, therefore, have a somewhat different frame of reference. For example, he mentions Brad Pitt at one point, so could he not have referenced Matt Damon or Vin Diesel, or Will Smith for his deprecating self-comparison? The analogy just leaped out at me as wrong.
On the subject of which, I have to also mention a cop's use of "…that broad's rear end…" at one point in the story. I don't have a problem with that particular observation because there are people who think like that in the real world, and it's unrealistic to pretend they don't exist in your novel, but in this day and age, does anyone really say 'broad' as a rather derogatory term for 'woman' or 'girl'? It seemed even more anachronistic than the Eastwood reference. Who knows? Maybe people do still say that.
The main female interest was Lilith, and she was written quite well, but I have to say I find it rather bizarre that she thinks that bad guy Faraday should be shot for putting his hands on her whilst "searching" her, yet she has no problem with Salvo ogling her and making remarks when she first meets him.
I also find it odd that when Salvo is watching Lilith's apartment because he fears for her safety, he outright lies when questioned by two cops in a patrol car, about his reason for being there. By lying, when there was no reason at all to do so and every reason not to, he put Lilith's safety in jeopardy. If he had truly cared about her, then he would have told the cops everything, putting her safety before all else. He hardly seemed smart or chivalrous to me after that. The only reason this was done was to achieve a certain end the writer wanted, and it was badly done.
There was another such weak spot when Salvo is fastened to an evidently wooden chair by a chain. I don't get why he doesn't simply break the chair. He has some ninety minutes before the bad guys return, yet he sits around and makes no effort to get free of the chair or to arm himself by breaking the chair and taking a piece of it for use as a club. I know he was concerned about making noise, but lives were in danger. This seemed too passive for the kind of guy we'd been led to believe he was.
Despite all those latter kinds of issues, I would have been willing as I said, to rate this positively, but I simply couldn't get past the way women were abused and misrepresented, thus (not thusly) I cannot recommend this novel.
