Author: Rickard B DeMille
Publisher: MacDonald, Barclay (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 book is often enough reward aplenty!
This is book one is yet another series - this one to be known as 'the Dawn Johnson mystery series', because why strive for something new when you can keep milking the same idea indefinitely? Hey, more strength to you if you can get the public to buy essentially the same novel over and over again. Microsoft has built an entire industry on doing that for decades! It’s a great business model, but it's not so kind to literature, but hey! that's a small price to pay.
I couldn’t finish this novel because it wasn't something which honestly appealed to me. The writing wasn't engaging and I didn’t find either of the main characters that interesting or appealing. When you find yourself not wanting to re-open the book, and when you do open it, discover that you're having to force yourself to read it, then you have to know it’s time to ditch it and move onto something which actually and naturally compels you to keep turning those pages.
The story switched back and forth between the PoV of the serial killer - some Dexter knock-off dickhead who took justice into his own hands because (he felt) some murderers had got away with it, and Dawn the FBI agent with, shall we say, a somewhat relaxed morality when it comes to justice. The author goes out of his way to make sure we fully understand that the 'good guy' Dawn, is African American and that she's also not a completely good guy in the traditional sense. I am not sure why that was. I mean it’s kudos for having a non-white character in a leading role - an effort which is sadly lacking in popular literature, but if you have to keep hitting the reader over the head with what you've done, it rather detracts from the self-evident wisdom of act in the first place.
Yeah, I know. And the thing is that I kept getting the feeling throughout the portion I read that in the end, Dawn was going to let this guy get away with murder - literally. I didn't read it all, so my view of this may erroneous, but it bothered me - if indeed it does end that way - that this guy would get away with it. Note that I don’t know if it does wind up like that, nor am I interested enough to find out. I'm just guessing, but if it does, then what does this say about our hero, Dawn, who permits this?
It bothered me that Dexter took justice into his own hands, but there were some mitigating circumstances in his case: first, he was sick in the head(!) and secondly, he went out of his way to get convincing proof that the guy/girl he was after actually was the perp. This didn’t make what he did right, of course, but it did offer some sort of explanation that a fiction writer and the attendant readership/viewership could accept.
The problem with this novel, for me, is that I got none of that: none of the effort required to prove the intended victim guilty. Maybe that appeared in parts of the novel I never read, but it was sufficiently lacking in the parts I did read that it turned me off this character (and it wasn't the only thing). That in turn put me off the main character who was going along with this rough justice (if indeed that's how it turned out) being meted out on what are, in the final analysis, truly sick people in dire need of medical help, deadly though they are. Once you sanction vigilantism, you remove the process from all scrutiny and from checks and balances, and you permit one person to be the arresting officer, the prosecutor, the defense, the jury, the judge, and the executioner.
Even aside from that, if none of that happens in this novel, I still had no compelling reason to keep on reading it. There was no hook for me - nothing that made me think, "Wow!" or "I gotta find out what happens next", or that strongly drew me to any of the characters. To me it was boring, just a series of events laid down one after another like so many dominoes.
There was the trope mystery going on here, too - the one which supposedly transcends the episodes and arcs over the entire series. Those things are artificial and boring to me, and this one has been done before. It’s no different from the one undergone by the female cop, Kate Beckett, in the TV series Castle, or by Carrie Wells, the eidetic cop in Unforgettable. It’s not enough for me to want to follow a formulaic and therefore ultimately boring TV show, or in this case to want to read a series of similarly formulaic novels, especially when I'm offered no good reason to do so.
