Author: Rene Natan (no website found)
Publisher: (no publisher found)
Rating: WARTY!
I made it only a quarter of the way through this. I could not get interested in any of the characters or in the plot, which seemed to be about so-called ‘white slavery’ and organized crime, but which was jumping around between endless characters so much that it was vague very nearly to the point of non-existence. I lost track of who was who and found that I didn’t even care. The novel has a list of main characters at the start, like it’s a play! This suggested to me that the author realized there was a problem here, but the "fix" just struck me as weird.
The actions, behaviors, and attitudes of the characters were often inexplicable. For example, the story starts with Jocelyn driving home in the snow and she stops at a pharmacy to get something for her stuffy nose. When she comes out, she’s handed a package by some guy she doesn’t know who evidently has confused her with his contact. She thinks it’s some sort of a promotional "flyer" and she drops it on thr ground like so much litter before getting into her car and driving off.
The guy who handed it to her doesn’t even retrieve it, neither do the police who are sitting right there in a car expecting just this transaction – police who were noticed by the woman but not even considered by the guy! The package evidently contained two hundred thousand dollars. That’s not the kind of thing someone hands to you as a promotion. Two hundred thousand dollars is hardly equivalent to the weight of your average flyer, even if it’s in large denomination bills. This entire beginning lacked credibility for me.
The woman immediately goes on vacation for two weeks, and the cops somehow fail to intercept her on the way to the airport, neither were they able to follow her in their car, nor were the two of them able to split up, enabling one to follow her while the other followed the guy. None of this made any sense or had any credibility either.
The woman’s attitude was completely wrong. When she was finally picked up, she showed no concern whatsoever that she had been implicated in some sort of illegal deal. She was flippant to the point of being at best, outright rude and at worst mentally deranged, yet it’s painfully obvious that one of the incompetent cops is going to end-up romantically involved with her. At least that’s how it seemed to me when I quit reading.
From that point, believe it or not, the novel went downhill even further, devolving into endless round robin exchanges between the cops on the one hand, and between the criminals on the other, and with some activity going on in a brothel, which I couldn’t follow by this time, so I gave up. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel. To me it was a disspitaed mess with no characters worthy of attaching myself to.
