Author: Jane Casey
Publisher: Minotaur 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.
This is yet another novel where the author (or the publisher - you can never tell who titles these things when Big Publishing™ effectively owns your work) should have taken a look at what's already out there before they buried this title with thirty more of the same by various authors! Ther was another more importnat issue which is that once agian we ahve a novel which is not even remotely well formatted for the Kindle. In the Kindle, when you click 'Beginning" as a location, it takes you right to the front cover or to the front endpaper, but in this novel, you get to 2% in. Yep. Not 1%. Not 3%, but precisely 2% in. I have no idea why, but it was really annoying.
This novel is about Maeve Kerrigan, a detective constable employed in London, UK. Her partner is Rob Langton and they're both assigned to the thoroughly uninventive serial killer named The Burning Man - that is a man who burns his victims, not someone like Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four. The novel isn't that interesting nor is it that engrossing. I felt no connection with any of the characters, and I had no real interest in reading about them. This made me rather sad because I really wanted to read a good novel about these London detectives. I was looking forward to it, but this police story left me feeling robbed. It's being plugged as "Mystery, Thrillers, Romance" but it's really none of the above.
The police investigation wasn't interesting or exciting. It was p-l-o-d-d-i-n-g, and that was the problem: this novel was a slog for me. I kept returning to it with little enthusiasm. When I was away from it I felt no great desire to get back into it. Kerrigan had nothing to offer me. She wasn't interesting. She wasn't kick-ass in any way. She had little self-respect. She was cluttered with cliché (lack of sleep, bad relationship, etc.). I felt tired from reading about her, and I felt like I was in a bad relationship with her as a character! She generated neither empathy nor sympathy in me.
Plus there was genderism in this novel - yet another case of it coming from a female writer, which I'm finding increasingly less palatable the more I'm forced to read it in novels like this. Check this line out: "It was a pretty nurse who showed us to Kelly Staples' room…" - because most nurses are ugly, so let’s be sure to point out the pretty ones? Seriously? Why is her prettiness (or otherwise) relevant here? Why draw attention to it when i has no bearing whatsoever on the action or events?
I'd reached less than one third the way through this - page 101 - when I decided I could not face reading it any more. That was the part where Kerrigan, having literally just showered, wrapped a towel around herself to go answer the door, when she has no idea who was there. Yes, she is expecting Langton to stop by "later", but she does not know it’s him right then. This seemed like such a pathetic cliché: the girl wrapped in a towel like some sort of present or offering for the guy's pleasure. I couldn't stand it.
What was actually worse, though, was how her partner 'managed' her. Prior to this towel encounter, he had forced her away from her desk at work and manipulated her into having him go round to her flat later, with the pizza and beer. I did not appreciate seeing yet another novel in which a woman is pushed around and manipulated by a guy who arrogantly assumes he knows what’s best for her. I did not appreciate seeing yet another novel in which a guy thinks its OK to do this. I did not appreciate seeing yet another novel in which a guy does this, and the woman sees nothing wrong with it. Is it really that hard to break the mould, and dump the trope, and come up with something original? Seriously?
I can see how there can be realistic places in a novel where your characters do things like this, but to have men and women depicted this way as though it should be the expected norm, and especially when there's no reason for it at all, is just shameful. It wasn't this one incident, either. There was a pattern of Langton treating her this way - though not always so overtly. If the novel had been really engrossing, and I'd been given some expectation of Kerrigan turning things around positively, I might have been willing to put up with this kind of writing temporarily, but I got no such expectation from this author. I know this is part of a series and I could see this author trotting out this same scenario in every volume.
You know, if you trot it out routinely enough, no matter how innocent you pretend it is in any one case, it becomes an established pattern - the behaviors become an expectation. I have no intention of subjecting myself to that when there are better novels awaiting me: novels with independent and strong women; novels with female characters I can respect and enjoy. Forget Burning! Go read Ash!
