Author: Jim Stevens
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!
This is novel two in my blog's Tiffany Day - two novels with the name 'Tiffany' in the title. This is the second one.
I made it about 15% the way through this before I gave up to go look for greener pastures. Life is too short to waste it gamely plowing through a novel that doesn’t entrance you from the off. There was nothing technically wrong in terms of the mechanics of putting words on paper, getting spelling and grammar right, etc, but it takes a lot more than that to make a novel a worthy read.
This is first person PoV, too, which is usually a mistake. Some authors can make it work, but ninety-nine times out of nine point nine, it fails because it's all "Me!" all the time and really, who cares? It’s especially hard to read when the narrator sounds like there's nothing more engrossing going on than reading-off a laundry list - and one that doesn’t even feature underwear to maybe perk it up a bit. It was tedious.
This is your bog-standard private dick novel, too. The author did try to de-cliché it by making the dick be the father of two daughters, but aside from that, he still sat it squarely in trope central. The dick is badly done-to, gets no respect, he's broke, has no love interest, and so on. Trope, meet cliché, cliché meet trope.... The dick is an ex cop who apparently got fired for hitting a superior ( I doubt that one offense, in absence of anything else, would merit a firing. A demotion and a transfer - and therapy - I can see, but summarily fired?
This does, of course, mean that he is actually a major dick. He seems to be clueless, too. He works (evidently part-time) and is really poorly paid for it, yet he's still paying alimony to his wife, with whom his kids normally reside, although he has full access to them, evidently. It’s apparently never crossed his mind to get a second job to buy the things he keeps whining that he doesn’t have.
His case? Try not to laugh, but the spoiled rotten daughter of his wealthy employer believes she was "roofied" at a dance bar one night. This is his 'case'. Seriously? This girl, Tiffany, is even more clueless than the Dick is, and she passed out in this bar. Those are the facts. According to the video surveillance, no one slipped her anything, so we don’t even know if she passed out from low blood sugar or something, or if she was drugged earlier (or very surreptitiously) or gassed, or something. We're told the dick gets a sample of blood, urine, and DNA. Seriously? What’s the DNA going to reveal? That she has a genetic predisposition to be clueless?!
Even if she was drugged, no crime took place (other than the drugging). She wasn't kidnapped or raped or anything. She simply passed out, was carried into the back office, and she woke up some time later and went home. It was essentially just as though she'd passed out drunk. Unless something bad happened in the back office (and there seems to be no suspicion of that in the portion I read), there's effectively no crime here and the girl just needs to find a better class of place to go dancing and never visit this particular dive again. Case solved!
My guess is that she was somehow made to give up some sort of password or pass code while she was woozy in the back-office and this was the crime - or at least the prelude to it: we're told that she has a whole palette of expensive classical artwork in her apartment, so maybe that's the motive. Or maybe she knows crucial things about her dad's business? Not that Private Dick thinks of that. He's obsessed with trying to track down all the people who were around her at the bar instead of focusing on what there might be to be gained from drugging her, and then apparently doing nothing with her.
But I was yawning too much over what I read in the first fifteen percent to want to fall asleep trying to read the last eighty-five percent. I just didn’t care about any of these characters, and especially not the Dick and Tiff.
