Title:
The Housewife Assassin's Handbook
Author:
Josie Brown
Publisher:
Signal Press
Rating:
WARTY!
Erratum:
At then end of chapter 2: "Of course, there are no oven mitts anywhere in site." should be "Of course, there are no oven mitts anywhere in sight."
It's the eighth of the month so this must be a novel which has a title starting with 'H'!
Sometimes books like this work, and sometimes they crash and burn, but they're so appealing to me that I keep on picking them up anyway, in the hope of finding a gem. One of my issues with books like this is that there can be some subtle (and not-so-subtle!) genderism involved - yes, women can be just as genderist as men. I noticed this in this novel, but it was relatively mild, so I decided to let it slide.
The premise in this story is that Donna Stone was married, unknowingly, to a CIA field agent named Carl. Carl had infiltrated a Russian mob, and they'd discovered him. On the same day - almost a the same time - that the Stone's third child, Trisha, was born, Carl's Porsche exploded and very little was left of him. Now Donna has followed in his footsteps to revenge her beloved husband's death, and she's not at all squeamish about doing whatever it takes to achieve her aim.
I don’t buy for a minute that Carl is dead! There was no body - in any meaningful sense - to identify, but if he isn’t, he's sure taking his sweet time letting his wife know that he's fine. For over a year Donna was still maintaining the increasingly absurd fiction that her husband abroad, on an extended tour of duty for Acme corporation - for which he works/worked, and which is a CIA front.
Meanwhile she's a mom to three children, and having to deal with teen tantrums and transportation. Initially she was living off Carl's continued salary as even the CIA, for reasons of their own, maintained the fiction that he was alive and well, and living incognito. Unfortunately, after that first year, this stipend ended stupendously, hence Donna's need for employment.
It was at 25% into this novel that the real turn-off showed-up in the form of a character named Jack. I've sworn never to purchase another book with a main character named Jack because I'm nauseated beyond polite language by the fact that this is the cheesiest, most over-employed, most brain-dead, most clichéd, laziest, most stupid-ass trope character name ever. I'm serious. Are authors so utterly vacuous and so deeply entrenched in their rut that they can’t think of a different name? Must they be hide-bound by mindless tradition? I guess so.
Now, I still have some books on my reading list which no doubt have a character with this name in them - such as this one, for example - and I'm committed to at least starting them because they're on my list, but I'm by no means committed to finishing such books or to giving them a good rating. In fact, were I to rate using stars (other than the binary 'worthy' five star or a 'warty' one star ratings which I habitually use), I would drop two or three stars for this alone. I'd drop another two or three for the fact that this jack-ass, who is supposed to be undercover, is driving around the neighborhood in a Lamborghini Aventador (the same car that billionaire Bruce Wayne drove in one of the Chris Nolan Batman movies).
So I was at this point faced with a problem in that I was enjoying this novel until this character name showed up, and it’s not only the name - the circumstances of his arrival were completely implausible. That alone would merit a one or two-star drop, and a further one or two stars would disappear because he has his "broad, muscled chest" and it's bared, which is another one or two star deficit for maximum trope-age. In addition to that, he's a complete jerk, so another two for sure there. At that point, this novel has plummeted from a potential five star rating down to something in the region of a negative four stars to a negative nine stars, depending upon what mood I was in when I quit reading (which may or may not coincide with my finishing the novel)! All because of this Jack(-off). It took very little time to decide.
As if that wasn't bad enough, this woman - whom the author has gone seriously out of her way to drill into us loved her husband beyond anything, misses him tragically, and can't stop thinking about him - has no problem whatsoever in throwing herself at this guy even as she deludes her mindless self that she hates him. So we’ve gone from a delightful novel where anything could conceivably happen to a completely clichéd one where it’s is so absurdly and painfully obvious what’s going to happen that the story is no longer even remotely interesting. I rate it warty!
