Rating: WARTY!
In this outing, teen model Axelle Anderson is in London. This is the second of these that I've read, and though normally - and thoroughly - disdain the fashion industry and fashion consciousness as the most self-absorbed, self-indulgent, abusive and wasteful activities ever devised, I found myself curiously liking the character and enjoying the story in the first volume, even though the title 'undercover model' is really wrong. She's actually an overt model and an undercover detective! There are three volumes published so far. I missed the second volume, so this is only my second outing. it didn't work out very well for me this time. It became obvious pretty quickly what the mystery was (hint: twins), yet the "detective' didn't even consider this forever, which spoke badly to her smarts.
The hardest thing for me to read in this series is the frequent mention of fashions, but I found in the first volume that if I ignored that, I enjoyed the rest of the story. This one didn't start out well, and the sad YA tropes started thick and fast, such as flecks of gold in the male's eyes: "...eyes (brown, with flecks of greengold..." Yes, 'greengold' is now a word! But seriously, can we get away from this flecks of gold nonsense? It's so tired now that it needs to be retired. I think maybe the 'greengold' was an accident because in the kindle app edition I read on my phone, I noticed there were quite a few such pairs of words run together. It seemed to be primarily where the word pair would normally have a hyphen between, and perhaps the conversion process to the Kindle format had missed a hyphen here and there? An example of this was in " state-of-theart", and this same phrase was used just a few paragraphs later with the hyphenation correct, so exactly what the problem here was, I can't pinpoint. The greengold eye disease revisits later: " I could see flecks of gold flickering in his eyes."
The chaptering was also messed up. I don't know if the original had dropped caps, but in the Kindle app version it had dropped lines! For example, if the sentence at the start of the chapter began, say, "As we quickly hurried for the train...", the Kindle app version would have the first letter 'A' on one line, the second letter (s) on the next line, and then the rest of the sentence on the third line. There were no screen-breaks between chapters, either; they just followed pell-mell after one another on the same screen as the previous chapter. It looked messy. This was an advance review copy which doesn't excuse shoddy presentation in this electronic age, but hopefully these flaws will be fixed before the final edition is released.
Some of the gaffes were amusing. This phrase belongs in the glossary of misheard song lyrics: " Thorough route aside," I think the author may have meant to write "Though that aside." How you would get what we did get from that, I don't know unless the word processor is doing automatic correction, or the text was being dictated, which in this case wouldn't surprise me.
In a similar vein, I read, "...a small pavilion in the far left corner of the Palace of Westminster caught my eye. I hadn't seen it before- it was small and whimsical..." Small is repeated, and repeating is, well, repetitive! Since it had already been described as small, then the second 'small' should have been left out. Something like, "... a small, whimsical pavilion in the far left corner of the Palace of Westminster now caught my eye. I hadn't seen it before..." would have worked a treat.
There were some plot problems. The beginning of this story is that photographer Gavin, the boyfriend of a friend of Axelle's, is apparently "mugged" when he was down by the River Thames investigating something. He's in a coma. Later his apartment is ransacked as though someone was trying to find or recover something. Axelle is brought in to see if she can discover what is going on. The mystery involves celebrity fashion designer Johnny Vane, and seems to center around a picture of Vane as a boy, arms around his twin brother Julian, who evidently died in a drowning accident in the Thames at the very spot the picture was taken. It was at this point that most of the plot became quite obvious even to me who usually gets these things wrong.
Despite the fact that Gavin is mugged, has his apartment ransacked, and is later discovered with the life-support unplugged in his hospital room, no one seems to think it's necessary to mount a guard on his room, not even the police! That's really insulting to the Greater London Metropolitan Police Service based at Scotland Yard (which is actually now New Scotland Yard!). The author appears not to appreciate that there's a distinction between that and the City of London Police Force which covers the City of London. The action centers around an area in the City of Westminster, however, so she is correct in specifying Scotland Yard.
One thing I didn't like was that Axelle doesn't come off as very smart in this story, and dumb main characters is not something I can abide. I don't mind if they start out dumb and wise up, but when they start out in a series as reasonably sharp, but become painfully, obstinately dumb by volume three, it's pretty clear that the series has lost its fire. The very first thing you should wonder, if you're dealing with one dead identical twin, is: "Is the surviving twin who he claims to be?" Is it Johnny who is still alive, or Julian, posing as Johnny for some reason - and how can you tell? This never crosses her mind - which made me suspicious! Whether this is the solution or not, it's not a good thing for the "detective' to have failed to even consider it.
Only the twins and their nanny were present at the drowning, so unless she could tell them apart, the surviving twin could have been either brother. Or if she could tell them apart, was she in on a murder or a cover-up? Or was it really just an accident and Julian really was the one who died - in which case, what's the significance of the photograph, if any? One twin is inevitably older than the other. Was one of them favored over the other? Did the older one stand to inherit? Was the older one Julian? Axelle never asks any of these questions, and while this may serve the author's plot, it doesn't serve her flagship character if it makes her look clueless. She looks especially so when we're told time after time about Johnny's love of wearing gloves - how he's never seen without them, and we get heavily pointed smack-you-hard-on-your-head hints about close ups and the photo of where both boys hands are visible. it just makes the main character look stupid and sad.
Talking of which there was some dumb text, such as this example: "... often find that looking at a person's house... can give away a lot about a person's preferences and lifestyle." Nope, always looking at a person's house gives these things away, and it's not something which takes a keen eye or a detective to figure out.
At one point Axelle is trying to find out information from the twins' nanny, but is called away by her boyfriend, who's helping her on this case. The reason he calls her away is that someone is coming to the house, but instead of sneaking into the yard after the visitor goes inside, to see if they could overhear what takes place, the two hurry away, thereby failing to avail themselves of a golden opportunity to find out something more. This tells me Axelle really isn't much of a detective after all.
There's your cliché teen love triangle here, too, with a new guy on the block, a rock star who starts coming on to Axelle. Never once does she ever clearly, unequivocally tell him she's in a committed relationship which is pretty pathetic on her part. Failing to do this means she is actively encouraging his attention. Then she acts surprised by the media attention she's garnering because she's photographed with this guy! If I were boyfriend Sebastian I'd think twice about allying myself with a woman who encourages male attention and invites trouble by failing to set clear boundaries.
This is another example of how dumb Axelle behaves in this story, and it's not remotely endearing. By continuing to effectively flirt with rock star Josh, she is, in a real way, being unfaithful to Sebastian. He doesn't strike me as the sharpest knife in the box, and he's rather immature, too, but he's a decent faithful guy and he deserves better than this. None of this made me warm-up to this story, and it made me actively dislike Axelle. At about sixty percent in I was ready to quit, since I pretty much knew the ending. I read to the end to make sure I was right about what I thought I was, and consequently this novel left me feeling tired and bored. It felt way too long and too much of a drag - in short, very different from the first one. I can't recommend it.
