Author: CR Wiley (no website found)
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
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!
The author of this novel actually emailed me and asked me to remove this review from Amazon because "...it contains so many spoilers and plot points that it could end up ruining the story ...". I disagree, and there was a warning at the head of the review on Amazon just like this: WARNING! MAY CONTAIN UNHIDDEN SPOILERS! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Detailed reviewing and discussion of writing is what my blog does, so I refused to accede to censorship and outright remove it, but as a pure courtesy I did remove parts of it and refer readers to Goodreads, or to my blog. Since I don't plan on reading anything else by this author, I consider this matter closed.
Note, please don't confuse CR Wiley with author RC Wiley or you're risking ending up paying a hundred and forty some dollars for a paperback!
So, gorgeous cover, nothing to do with the story as usual! This story recounts the adventures of Nora Wexler, a new FBI agent, which is hilariously, how her colleague introduces her to his family. I found that rather strange. Would someone really introduce a colleague like that rather than just saying, "This is my colleague, Nora."? Why introduce her as a new FBI agent?
Yes, if the guy was really nervous or inept, he might, but that's not what Agent Greer has shown himself to be - quite the opposite, in fact, so he didn't sound realistic to me, phrasing it that way. It sounded more like the author had forgotten that this had already been established, and tried to establish it in that way.
This wasn't the only odd thing which caught my attention. Throughout this novel, Travis Greer was always referred to as Travis in the narrative, whereas Nora Wexler was always Wexler. Why? I've seen a lot of writing where females are referred to by first name whereas males are just the last name, so was this to try and balance that out? It was just odd and distracting! Why not use both firsts or both lasts?
Nora is new and idealistic, and obsessed with going after Internet offenders of one kind or another - mostly pedophiles and stalkers. This brings her into conflict with her boss, who wants her to focus on bigger pictures - such as terrorism. Nora gets a break when someone begins stalking three women who are successful and independent, who meet once in a while as friends, and who now find themselves under the brutal attention of a psycho.
Nora's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. At one point she introduces her self with: "...my name is agent Nora Wexler". No! Her name is Nora Wexler. Her professional title is 'agent'. She should simply say "I'm Agent Nora Wexler." It doesn't make a character look smart if they introduce themselves this way, although it does happen more often than is helpful. We don't improve our readership by talking down to them, we improve them by lifting them up to join us.
Their first encounter with this fate is when Jenny Iverson receives a parcel containing what appears to be her missing cat's head. Next, her friend Erin Clausson discovers that her assistant, Ricardo Lantham has been 'poisoned'. Finally, Lyla Robbex is targeted via her high-school age daughter, whose new car is bombed. Fortunately, Lori wasn't in the car when the bomb went off.
Very soon, Wexler and Greer have a suspect - Christopher Walden - in their sights. I didn't buy it though! It was too early in the book, and there was no evidence other than the single fact that he'd had one date with each of the three women (not that any of them knew he'd dated the other two as well). They were evidently all using a dating site on which he was also a member.
My suspect, pretty much as soon as I "met" her, and for reasons I can't really articulate, was Clausson. Like I said, I don't know why, and I'm sure not going to spoil it by telling if I was right or wrong (I'm usually wrong, FYI!), but that was where my money, for better or for worse, went. I was probably wrong because when I quit reading this it seemed like there was a much more realistic suspect (than the first one identified in this novel) in the agents' sights.
The really weird thing is that the FBI agents, one and all, were completely convinced right away that this initial person of interest was their guy! Based on this flimsy evidence, they were able to invade his home, search it and lie in wait for him arriving home from work I found that hard to swallow, and I sure hope the FBI isn't so gullible that they can so easily convince themselves of their rectitude based on a coincidence, when there's nothing else whatsoever condemning him. I hope our judges are not so clueless as to grant search warrants based on such flimsy 'evidence', either. OTOH, they have done some really dumb stuff.
Truth be told, by the time I was a third of the way through this novel, I was seriously starting to doubt the smarts of our two FBI agents. Lori, the girl who was almost blown up, was rolling in money which her mother could not have given to her, yet neither the agents nor her own mom seemed seriously interested in pursuing that damning fact!
In addition to this, and as he left Lori's hospital room with Wexler, Agent Greer noticed that someone was spying on them from a closet, yet he never stopped the elevator and went to find out who this was. I'm sorry, but this is at best incompetence, and at worst, gross negligence on his part, and made me lose a lot of faith in this story. I don't mind law-enforcement having road-blocks to overcome, but when the roadblocks are glaringly artificial, or make the main characters just look stupid, I can't help but find the writing wanting.
Another issue I had was that the poisoning episode wasn't food poisoning (the immediate suspect), but potassium chloride poisoning. KCl is essentially the same as NaCL - the sodium chloride with which fast food joints baby-powder your fries. It's salt. It never fails to fascinate me that you can get a deadly poisonous gas (which was used to kill people in World War One, and which is still used to wipe-out germs in bleach) and mix it with a metal which explodes on contact with water, then sprinkle the result on your fries, and they taste great! Better living through chemistry....
The problem is that while KCl is used as part of the lethal injection trilogy of chemicals, it actually does have to be injected. You can't eat it and die. Well, technically, you can, but you'd have to consume so much at once that you'd end up throwing-up. So this had to be delivered via a needle, yet we don't learn of this from the coroner who should have been looking for a needle site as soon as he or she discovered what the cause of death was! More incompetence.
As it happens, Nora is on the verge of being dumped from the case and sent back home because of her incompetence, but of course, the psycho comes to her rescue. Now he's sent a taunting email to her, and just as she's reading it in her room before getting ready to take a plane back home, some guy shows up at the door to the B&B where she's staying, and the owner shows him up to Nora's room. Nora has no idea whatsoever who this guy is, but she blindly assumes it's the psycho without any evidence whatsoever - in short, she makes exactly the same mistake which got her thrown off the case!
Worse than this, she could have apprehended the perp right there (if it was him), but she ran away! Seriously? She could have called the FBI, but instead she texts Greer for help! Double seriously? Instead of opening the door and confronting him, thereby taking him by surprise, she dives out the window. Instead of seeking out his vehicle, which would have been easy, and getting a line on him, and even disabling it, she hides by the front door to the B&B until the owner comes back out. By this time, the visitor has gone and the lead has been lost. Nora Wexler is the worse law enforcement officer ever.
It was at this point that I decided I didn't care who the perp was or how she, he, or it was brought to justice. This novel was not something in which I had any more interest when there are better reads begging for my attention. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel.
