Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark

Rating: WARTY!

Read somewhat annoyingly by Carol Higgins Clark, this novel failed to launch, which is sad because it's the first of about four Christmas novels I intend to review this month. I hope the others are better!

Apparently it's something of a tradition for this pair of family members to write a Xmas novel together, and after this I'm thinking that tradition ought to die a natural death under the snow, allowing something fresh and different to spring up next year in its place. This is the second novel I've read that the mom had a hand in, and I'm done with Higgins Clark stories at this point.

This one featured two kidnappers - whose names we knew from the off, so no mystery there - who kidnap the husband of a successful novelist, knowing she can well afford the million dollar ransom. One of the kidnappers is so puerile as to be a joke. It's not remotely possible to imagine that the other guy would ever trust him with something like this - and of course he screws up royally. The kidnappers are so dumb that they follow the plot of one of the writer's novels exactly, yet the police are too stupid to predict what will happen next despite this.

Not that any of the other characters are any more realistic. They're flimsy caricatures, every bit as cheap and nasty as the tinsel and baubles which bedeck a evergreen fir tree at this time of year. They undergo no development. Any one of them could be substituted with a different character and the story would have worked just as badly. The story is larded and puffed up with tedious extraneous detail. These two writers can't introduce a character without describing their hair and age - nothing else, just hair and age! How and why is that ever relevant?! Talking of which, the title of this novel bears no relation whatsoever to the story, which could have been set at any time of the year. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Xmas. The overall impression I got was that this was essentially nothing more than a mercenary attempt to cash in on seasonal excesses, and I can't recommend it.

The Lost Years by Mary Higgins Clark

Rating: WARTY!

Read acceptably by Jan Maxwell

So today's the twelfth of the month, which means that it's time to post a review for a novel beginning with the letter 'L'.

What's the deal with two slight variations on the same cover?! I know lots of novels are reissued with a different cover, usually for no good reason, but these two are pretty much exactly the same! What's the point? Did they think we would think it's a different novel? Is it supposed to be better somehow? Is it more artistic?! Which genius came up with this, and how much do they get paid for their 'inventiveness' and 'originality'? No one puts their head deeper in their patootie than does Big Publishing™, I swear!

This novel was supposed to be a detective story, or so I'd believed when I picked it up at the library, but the detectives were only minor characters here! What? I am not kidding you! At least that's how it was for as far as I listened to the audio book, which wasn't very far. The book read (or rather 'listened') like it was a daytime TV soap opera with nothing interesting going on, and populated with boring characters who held even more boring conversations at every turn. It was like the murder was merely a prop for people to get together and mindlessly gossip about anything and everything other than the murder.

The premise is that an ancient letter was discovered, supposedly written by Jesus to Joseph of Arimathea, and that it was in the possession of Biblical scholar Jonathan Lyon, who intended to hand it over to a museum when he had finished studying it. Someone evidently didn't like this plan, and shot him.

It was Mrs Lyon in the study with a revolver - who was discovered with her husband's body lying slumped over his desk, by their daughter Mariah. The wife was suffering some form of dementia, and it seemed obvious from the start that she wasn't the perp, even as she was found holding the gun and covered in blood. Way to trumpet "Red Herring!". OTOH, she may have been the perp. I can't tell you because didn't get past disk one of the CD set. That's how chronically boring this story was. I didn't regret abandoning it, either. The next audio book I moved onto proved to be highly entertaining.

It's hard to believe that an established and experienced writer like Mary Higgins Clark makes the amateur mistake of having a character's description flow from her reflection in a mirror. That's considered, rightly or wrongly, a no-no, and would alone get a novel rejected by your typical agent were it written by any writer who didn't already have their foot firmly in the door. It just goes to show the crap you can get away with when you're not a newbie, doesn't it?

From what I've read in the reviews of others, this ancient letter is irrelevant because it plays no part in the story other than being the motive for the murder. It's also absurd in that this letter, had it been real (not that it could have been, but if) would have been a sensation, yet it's essentially treated as completely unimportant - at least as judged from the portion to which I listened.

I'm an atheist and don't believe there ever was a son of a god. There were lots of Jesuses (or rather Yeshu's or Yeshua's or Yehoshua's since Jesus was not a Hebrew name). Some of them may even have been rabbis, and some may have been crucified. A heck of a lot of people were, but there's no evidence to suggest that any of them was a son of a god, so this part was irrelevant to me, as indeed it was to the story.

The novel was completely uninteresting. Not even a bit of it was worth the listening, so there's nothing more to say except that I can't recommend this based on the portion of it that I suffered through.