Author: Stanley R Lee
Publisher: Brash Books
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!
Today is Stan Lee day on my blog, but note that this author isn't the Stan Lee of Marvel comics fame (although Barnes & Noble's web site is stupid enough to have his picture tied to this book, and Amazon idiotically conflates him with the better-known Stan Lee!). He's a completely different guy, Stanley R Lee, who died in 1997. While it's nice that this work is still freshly available I hope the recompense for it is going to a good cause.
I have to say up front that this book was a study in inconsistency in modern publishing. I first began reading it on the Kindle, and there were multiple problems: every word which had 'th' in it had a blank in place of 'th'. There was also a blank in place of 'wo', and a blank in place of 'ft', and that was just on the first two screens! This would have resulted (purely as an example) in the sentence, "There was the worst bafflement in those on the left" being rendered "_ere was _e _rst ba_ement in _ose on the le_" (note that I used an underscore for the blank space, for clarity).
Fortunately the Adobe Digital Editions version was free of these problems, but I've encountered other novels where the reverse was the problem: the ADE version being far from perfect and the Kindle version perfectly legible. My question is "Why?" This is no longer an era of some poor guy (or much more rarely some poor woman) having to pick out lead letters from a series of drawers and patiently line them up, rank and file, in a tray. This is the era of e-publishing, so I can find no excuse whatsoever for poor spelling or formatting, not even in a so-called "galley" proof.
That said I had to DNF this novel even in the readable format because I simply could not get into it no matter how I tried to focus on it. I don't know what it was, and I couldn't get past it. Page after page was just boring to me. I sincerely hope others have more luck with it than I did, but it didn't speak to me at all. It just had nothing to offer me and pull me in.
The story is about an absurdly named secret US government organization named 'The Library' (trust me, the TV show is better), which spies on the Russians, as absurd as that is (for when this was written). There's a traitor amongst them, however, and it's up to a Sherlock Holmes type amongst them to ferret him out before the world ends. Yeah, it's like that, but it wasn't for me.
