Author: Marnie Riches
Publisher: Maze Books (website not found)
Rating: WARTY!
Erratum:
Sgraffito should be graffito?
Note this is not to be confused with J Montecristo's The Girl That Wouldn't Die (which I haven't read).
I love an author who knows that it's chaise longue and not chaise Lounge. Same letters, different order, and Marnie Riches knows the difference! That said, I had some seriously mixed feelings about this as I read it. There were parts where it got really slow, with student conversations - boring conversations - being relayed in too much detail, but just as I was wondering if I really, honestly, wanted to read this, it would pick up again and some interesting material would play out, so I kept reading. In the end, however, the slow nothing happening pages far outweighed the action and I grew too bored to finish it.
It's split into two interleaved parts which initially seem to have little in common other than that the main character in each is a young female, but it becomes crystal clear later, what's going on. One part, set in Britain, features Ella, a girl in high school who is talked - by a cop - into joining a local drug gang as a narc, to help out her mother's criminal case which is pending. Ella puts her life on the line to infiltrate the gang and has a hard time doing it initially, and then another hard time keeping herself out of trouble as much as possible and avoiding the advances of the young drug lord, a hot guy whose girlfriend is downright mean. I was more of a fan of Ella than I was of George, the other female character. George really wasn't likeable at all.
One big issue I had with this is that we're tossed back and forth not only between those two story lines, but also between a score of characters, police officers, unsavory philandering college professors, and a whole bunch of interchangeable students, many of whom have their own story line. It was really hard to keep track of who is who and why I should care about them anyway, a lot of the time. Plus it seemed like the villain was one of two characters: one a main character who seemed to me to be a huge red herring, and the other a minor character who showed up just often enough to make me suspicious, but as I said, I didn't care in the end, so I never did find out if I was right, I'm usually not!
People are disappearing, and some of those who disappeared showed-up in the rubble of a bombed building the bomb still strapped to them. By around page one hundred it became pretty obvious what was happening, and the only mystery really, was how long it would take George to figure it out, but the MO was changing, so my interest was sustained for a while. The problem here was that George should never have been involved in any of this in the first place. There was no reason for her to be other than that the author simply wanted it this way, and the more I read of George, the less I liked her. She was really a jerk and a busybody, and I found nothing to either empathize or sympathize with.
Then there was the deus ex machina factor. At one point George was breaking into apartment. She opens door and alarm starts counting down. Just as she’s trying to guess what the four digit code is to silence it, she gets a text with the answer. That struck me as way too convenient and didn't make George look very smart. There was no reason for her to break in where she was breaking in. She was, once again, just being an annoying busybody.
There was a minor writing issue, too, which I like to raise since my blog is all about writing. One of the characters is named Ad. Chapter 20 begins like this: “Had Ad not had a stinking hangover…”. I think I would have reworded that. It sounds really awkward, which would be fine if you were going for comedy, but this novel is not intended to be a comedy. For me, I would have written something like “The beauty of the Church of the Holy Spirit was lost on Ad, condemned to hell as he was by the debilitating power of his hangover” or something along those lines. But that's just me.
In short, I can't recommend this. The writing itself wasn't too bad at all, in general terms, but the pace was agonizingly slow, and the character motivations were simply non-existent. It just wasn't realistic. The thing is that I might even have been willing to let this author get away with that, had it not been so damnably boring, and had her main character been remotely likeable.
