The Valentine Circle by Reinaldo DelValle

Title: The Valentine Circle
Author: Reinaldo DelValle
Publisher: Smashwords
Rating: WARTY!

This is another novel with a prologue which I promptly skipped. If the author doesn't think it's worth putting it into chapter one or beyond, then I don't think it’s worth my time reading it. I've adopted this policy consistently with novels and have never had any cause to regret it or feel like I've missed something important. That nicely confirms for me everything I've felt about prologues!

It’s set in Boston in 1885. Silas has lost his memory, but is inexplicably taken onto Inspector Belloc's police team which is investigating the murders of teenaged girls, all of whom are pregnant. Silas meets Polly - another of Belloc's team - who doesn’t like Silas, which automatically announces loudly and clearly that the two will become an item. Yawn.

Polly has a secret which we don't learn about until we're almost half way through. Indeed, nothing happens up to the half-way point. We don't learn a single thing about Silas except that he's probably a fully-trained ninja (which no one else, not even Silas, seems to grasp). Indeed, it's not until around that half-way point that we even hear of the titular Valentine Circle, so my recommendation is not to read this, but if you do read it, then start at the half-way point - you will not really miss anything imnportant.

This story was p-o-n-d-e-r-o-u-s-l-y slow. I mean it was r-e-a-l-l-y slow. It was t-e-d-i-o-u-s-l-y slow. And did I mention that it's v-e-r-y slow? How slow is it? I'm glad you asked. This novel is so slow that even the hare beats it.

I'm serious. It moved achingly slowly and some things were telegraphed w-a-a-y ahead of time, and page after page after page went crawling by with little-to-nothing happening. The story wasn't trashily bad, and the writing was decent - spelling, grammar, etc, but it was so lumberingly slow that I could not honestly stand to read any more of it. I have better things to do with my time. Maybe you will have better luck with it than I did, but I cannot in good conscience recommend this one except as a risk-free alternative to sleeping pills.

The Body in the Woods by April Henry

Title: The Body in the Woods
Author: April Henry
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: worthy

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.

Errata:
p75 "A Lexis" should be "Alexis".
p80 "cellophone?" "cellophane" maybe?
P149 "Her mouth water…" "Her mouth watering" maybe?

I enjoyed this novel a lot. It was well-written, with sufficient technical detail to make it sound authentic (to me anyway!), yet not with so much that you require a Tom Clancy official barf bag to deal. April Henry has some twenty or so novels out there for various ages, so I plan on looking up some more of her work. I did find some typos, which to me is really inexcusable in this day and age of electronic word processors and spell-checkers, but a lot of advanced review copies seem to be that way for some obscure reason. April Henry should ask me to beta-read her next novel!

Alexis, Nick, and Ruby are teens in high school who have volunteered and are in training for Search and Rescue. They're called at school one November afternoon to help find a missing autistic boy. The boy is found, but not by them. What they do find in their part of the forest, is the dead body of a young woman who has evidently been strangled. And the killer is watching as the EMTs and police show up. He takes a shine to Ruby - a natural redhead. I wonder why?

The three teens are quite different superficially, but have connections below the surface. Ruby is bordering on obsessive about crime scenes and serial killers. Nick likes to draw pictures his teachers think are disturbing. He has fantasies of military service, taking after his departed dad. Alexis is living with her mom, surviving on disability and foodstamps, and her mom is off her meds, paranoid, yet paradoxically behaving like a particularly irresponsible child.

Talking of irresponsible, this was refreshingly not one of those novels which has kids acting unilaterally without involving the police. The interactions between the kids and the law enforcement officers were well thought-out such that they felt realistic and responsible, whilst still giving the teens sufficient motive and room to act independently without them looking stupid for not involving the cops. It was nice to see an author demonstrate (for those less capable) how this can be done!

Something (which is initially unspecified) has happened between Alexis and Ruby, meaning they no longer hang out together, but all three decide they need to help catch this murderer, who is stepping up his game. He picks on homeless kids, since they're such easy targets when he approaches them pretending to be from a help organization, and handing out free gifts of gloves or chap stick. Some of the things he hands out contain GPS trackers, so he can sit in his office, or in the warm comfort of his home, and play his sick game of stalking his potential victims electronically.

There's a really oddball bit where an out-of-shape wannabe hiker tries to hike a trail that's only 1.3 miles, but who gives up before he finishes, and turns round to head back, but who then gets lost(!). The SAR team has to find him, but we’re told that it takes them an hour to get to him. I found that completely bizarre! It's not explained why it takes them an hour to hike less than a mile, but it does say that there are three routes, so the team splits into smaller groups to cover all three. It's possible, therefore, that this particular group took the long way around, but if that's the case, why didn’t one of the other two teams find him first? This just struck me as confusing at best and poorly written at worst. Actually, not even poorly written. I was impressed by the quality of the writing in this novel, so I should say poorly-planned instead.

Overall, however, I really enjoyed this novel and I recommend it. It has good characters who behave both naturally and intelligently, strong females, and a decent plot. It was a great thrill and a good ride, and it's well worth the reading. I liked how it was written, how the characters behaved and interacted, how there were plenty of red herrings, but not stupid red herrings, and how the plot slowly gathered around the real perp, with plenty of excitement and unnerving bits here and there.

The Burning by Jane Casey

Title: The Burning
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!

Hacked by Geri Hosier

Title: Hacked
Author: Geri Hosier
Publisher: Amazon
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.

Please note that there are some serious formatting problems in the Kindle version of this novel. The formatting was better when the text was shrunk very small, but it was still a problem. For example, chapter 8 begins with the title, (which is simply 'Chapter 8') running on the same line as the last line of chapter 7, no page break, no paragraph break, not even a line break. The isn't the only example of a "run-on" chapter! And at 20% in I discovered a new make of helicopter: a Sirkovsky! Not to be confused with the much better-known Sikorsky...!

You know you don't actually have to give a brand name or a make (not for me anyway - I can do without them) - especially if you're not sure of it. You can just say 'helicopter'. I don't even care if you turn it into a verb and say that people were 'helicoptered' in. It's really not important to me as a reader what type of helicopter it was. There is no excuse in this electronic age, however, for formatting or spelling issues in a novel, not even in a so-called galley proof.

The inappropriate words I can understand to some extent in a first draft, but first drafts are certainly not ready for submission as advance reading copies! Given the general sloppiness of the writing overall, I have to take all this into account in this review. If an author cannot be bothered to make the effort - even to run a spell-checker once through their novel before submitting it for review - then why should I read it through once? I sound like an agent, don't I?! I'm not! I just care about writing.

Onto the story. Liv Paxton is the head of a London homicide team which is investigating a celebrity cell phone hacking scandal and some associated deaths. I guess someone dialed M for murder! The very first problem I ran into with this novel was the info dump problem. There was too much in the first few screens, with zero action. Take this sentence as an example: "She pushed her chin-length dark brown, red-hennaed hair behind her left ear and pushed her designer off-the-right-shoulder black lace dress, which was making her feel a little over-exposed, discreetly back up onto her shoulder." And this was at one percent in!

A sentence like this is way too packed. There may be readers who care about her hair being "hennaed" or her dress being designer. I don't. On the contrary, I find that kind of writing to be pretentious. As long as sentences like that are rare, I can read the novel containing them without them becoming an issue for me, but if I'm going to be encountering that kind of sentence frequently, it does not bode well for my rating of the novel! Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to play on, Macduff, and damned be him who first cries ‘Hold! enough!’.

I know how easy it is to miss something, or to let a grammar error or a misspelling go by. I'm trans-Atlantic myself, so I'm often finding myself in the position of wondering upon which side of "the pond" a given spelling belongs. Plus I tend to have 'dyslexic fingers' so while I know perfectly well how to spell the word, sometimes when I type fast, the letters don't always end up in the right order, which necessitates excessive editing and re-reading. I should just learn to type properly!

What all this means for those of us who have such problems, or aren't good at spelling, or grammar, or who might actually be dyslexic or something along those lines, is that we have to work that much harder! And whilst we do have spell-checkers, they can only tell us if the spelling is correct, not if it's the correct spelling for the way the word is used, and certainly not if it's the correct use of that word! Microsoft's grammar checker in Word is useless. I detest and loathe Microsoft, so I don't use their products at home. I run Ubuntu Linux on my computer, and use Soft Office, which is perfectly fine, but which offers no advantage in the areas I've mentioned. It does have a good spell-checker, however, for which I am really grateful (and definitely not 'greatful'!).

The only way to get a leg-up here is to read lots of well-written material, and as much as I disdain the so-called classics, they are well-written. That doesn't mean we should write all our novels like Jane Austen, for example, wrote hers, but we can learn some style from those people. We can learn how to tell a story, and from the really good ones, we can learn how not to jam up the first few pages with excessive description.

But back to the novel. The more I read of this, the less I felt I wanted to read of it. The story isn't outright bad, but it's not that great either, and the technical problems with the text became worse. There was an increasing number of spelling errors and typos, for example where the 's' from the start of word two is accidentally tagged onto the tail of word one instead. At one point there was the non-word Causcasians. There were variations on the word 'lairy' - which is a word, but which appears to be used in the wrong context here - and this was confusing. I'm wondering if 'hairy' was what was intended, but given the other issues with formatting and spelling, I have no idea whether it's right or wrong, whether it was intended or not, or whether it was supposed to be 'hairy' and not 'lairy'. In short, I could not trust the author here because of too many issues elsewhere! These are just a few examples.

The old excuse that this is a "galley proof" doesn't cut it today. Not for me it doesn't. There's no excuse at all for bad formatting or for spelling errors in an era where novels are written on computers and all word processors have a spell checker. Had the novel been more engrossing, I might have been distracted enough that I wouldn't get the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard feeling whenever I encountered one of these, but when the story drags, that's when you really notice the potholes in the road. I didn't like the main character Liv, or her best friend, newspaper tycoon Louise. Neither of them seemed to act their age and they were both snobs.

They also had some weird ideas about gender roles, too: for example, they're all for equality - head cop, head of newspaper, which is perfectly fine, but then Liv insists upon a guy who is 'masculine', and she defines that by a guy who opens doors for her and pulls out a chair for her when they go to dinner! Seriously? You can't have it both ways. Either the genders are equal (at least in intent) or they're not. If you're not equal, you can be treated "like a woman" (whatever antique notion that satisfies) and have your coat draped over your shoulders for you as you leave, and the door opened for you as you arrive, and your seat pulled out for you as you go to dinner. If you're equal, then you can pull out your own chair! Unless we're going to take turns pulling out chairs and opening doors. That's equality! What's Liv going to ask for next - to have her stool pulled out by a strong, masculine man?!

The biggest problem from a reading enjoyment perspective was that all this 'James Bond' style futzing around with expensive clothes, flash cars, dallying with a romance, and dog's dinners, was that it all-too-frequently put the actual story on a back burner. The reason I selected this novel was that I wanted to read the detective story. If I'd wanted a romance to dominate the story I'd have picked up a romance (which is unlikely, but it has happened!). Instead of getting on with the story here, I found it often tossed into the back seat in favor of pursuing the budding relationship between Liv and Mr Perfect, who was a decorated soldier and very much a Mary Sue. I had no interest in him or in their romance. Yes, I was interested in the potential link between him serving in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and there being two hundred million pounds' (sterling) worth of heroin going missing there, and it would have been great had it turned out that he was behind it all, but having had the thankless task of wading through the swampy waters of the first 25% of this, I really had no energy and no interest in wading any more even to get to the bottom of that mystery. I can't honestly and in good conscience rate this novel a worthy read.

Damaged by Alex Kava

Title: Damaged
Author: Alex Kava
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!

Narrated ably by Eby - Tania Eby that is - although her delivery isn't anything to write home about. She might do better with better material.

Damaged is a really apt title for this disaster of a novel. Brain-Damaged might be a better one. You know how writers are always lectured to start at the beginning - i.e. start where the action (aka story) starts? Kava ignores that and gets published anyway, which just goes to prove that anyone who writes rules about how you should write (and not a one of those rule-writers is anyone you ever heard of!) is full of it, period! It's not your writing style that matters; it's who you know and what you can get away with. Keep that in mind now we can all self-publish.

This is my first Alex Kava, and also my last. I'm not impressed at all. She is one of the most procrastinating and plodding writers I've ever read in my life. She simply cannot get this story started. She writes on and on and on for chapter after chapter with not a thing happening. Her digressions are all over the place and not a one of them moves the story forwards. Perhaps she has a plan to tie them all up in a neat bow at the end, but at this point I really don't care, because I'm so sick of her tedious drunken rambling.

By chapter nine, we still didn't even have the body and the investigator in the same state, let alone the same room. Kava starts the first two chapters with rambling nonsense about how the body is discovered - not a crossed 't' or a dotted 'i' of which is relevant. It's a cut-up body in a cooler! So we couldn't start with the main character opening it up? Nope, we had to start with an entire chapter rambling mindlessly about a female newbie in the coastguard having to prove herself by showing how idiotic she was that she went down to recover a floating cooler in rough seas where no lives were at stake. I sincerely hope our coastguard is smarter than this and our women in the coast-guard service are not this pathetic. And what was the point of this chapter - other than to lecture us about the thing we already know: women have to play by different rules, that is? There was none. I was nauseated, but it wasn't from the rough seas.

So do we get right to it in chapter two? Nope! In chapter two we get the so-tired-that-it's-sawing logs cliché of an overworked criminal profiler who has other issues, too. She can't sleep. She's in trouble with her boss. She's a mess. Oh, and she has a dog! So having begun with the overworked cliché of an overworked cliché, will we see a concluding cliché of her sleeping soundly? I honestly couldn't care less about her. At one point she ends up in a helicopter with the coastguard rescuing some idiot off a wrecked boat for absolutely no reason whatsoever that I could see. Maybe there was a sentence in one of those tiresome tracks which I skipped which explained it, but I had no interest whatsoever in skipping back through ninety-nine tracks per disk (yes, it was one of those) on the off chance that I could locate this one pertinent fact in a monotonous miasma of irrelevancy.

I am rating this warty before I finish it because after three disks (of a total of five), I see no merit in it at all, nor any sign of any. The only reason I was likely to finish it was that I didn't yet have my replacement audio-book, so I thought I might as well see if this was ever going anywhere remotely in sight of an intelligent conclusion, but I couldn't even manage that, because I became so tired of listening to it gong nowhere. This novel is definitely warty!

Red 1-2-3 by John Katzenbach

Title: Red 1-2-3
Author: John Katzenbach
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Rating: WARTY!

This is the first Katzenbach that I've ever read, so I have nothing to go on but what's before me; that's the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it! But will it be Katzenbach Falls or The Adventure of the Red Circle Down the Drain?"? Well, I had mixed feelings about this one right up to the end. It wasn't until I started editing the final version of this review that I realized that this novel did not have what it takes to be a worthy read. It wasn't atrocious: parts of it were inventive and well-written, but it wasn't worthy, either. There was just too much wrong with it.

This novel centers around a serial killer (and novelist!) coming out of retirement. How that works exactly, remains unexplained! I can see a novelist doing this, but isn't 'Serial Killer' a lifelong profession? A serial killer may be retired (in an active sense) but not through any action of his own. But this man links his killings to successful novels that he writes based upon those murders, so when he started fading from public acclaim, why did he not pull his Red Riding Hood murders out of his hat then? Why wait until now? We're given no explanation.

This man is also old for a serial killer - in his sixties - and he's married, which is rare for a serial killer. You would think that this addition of a wife would add a real twist to the story, adding complexity and a certain element of randomness, and jacking up the tension, but right when it appears to be tightening tension, it suddenly goes nowhere. The killer feels that he doesn’t have much time left because his parents died in their sixties and he expects the same fate, so he wants to commit one last murder (or rather, series of murders) and write one last novel about it, and make this all worthy of The Guinness Book of World Records.

The three victims he chooses are all redheads (hence the title, Red 1-2-3), but other than that and the fact that they're all female, they seem to have nothing at all in common. At first. Sarah Locksley (Red two) used to be a school teacher until her husband and three-year-old daughter died in a car accident. From that point on, she gave up on life. Jordan Ellis (Red three) is a 4th year college prep school student who plays basketball with a vengeance. Her parents are having a contentious divorce, leaving her in the middle, and paradoxically feeling very much alone and doing poorly in school. Karen Jayson (Red one) is a doctor of geriatrics, and an amateur comedian. It turns out that the killer's wife is a patient of hers, and she's also the principle's secretary at Jordan's school. Other than those two facts, we're given nothing to link them together. It's never revealed how the killer chose his victims or what links they had (in his mind), and since no detective is ever on this case I guess it doesn't matter, but it felt really odd.

The killer-to-be has been stalking these three women for many months and continues to stalk them. He sends "introductory" letters signed "Big Bad Wolf" to each of them. We never learn the killer's name. He's always the wolf. His wife is referred to as Mrs Big Bad Wolf throughout. We're not even allowed to read those letters, so this is yet another in a list of things I simply didn't get about this novel. Each woman gets her letter on the same day, but only one of them calls police. The detective is a complete jerk and offers no help. He doesn’t even want to see the letter. This initial lack of interest is used as a really poor excuse for the women never to go to the police again, even when they have some good solid evidence that their plight is real. I found this approach to be completely unrealistic. More on this anon.

I almost gave up on this novel in the first couple of pages because Katzenbach writes like Stephen King, and trust me, that's not a compliment when it comes from my keyboard. Katzenbach's philosophy quite evidently, is "Why write a word when you can make it into a sentence? Why write a paragraph when a page would be far better, and why write a description of anything at all unless you’re fully prepared to occupy several pages with it?" Seriously, it’s tedious to read this prose. For example, he has one recipient of the letter determined to arm herself. So far, so good. There is a gun in the house in a locked box, and Katzenbach has her go get it, but he manages to fill four whole pages with this action alone! It’s t-e-d-i-o-u-s. Naturally I've started skipping page after page of his text in search of interesting bits - of which there are, to be fair, quite a few, but curiously, very few of these involve the killer himself. I tended to skip most of the parts which were written from his perspective. It was boring. After the opening few chapters his writing seemed to improve somewhat (or maybe I grew more immune to it). The parts about the women, including the killer's wife, were much more readable than any other parts.

Note to authors: I don’t care if you've compiled an extensive biography for every last, even remotely tangential character in your entire novel. I certainly don’t want to read it. I came for the story, not for a life history of the world's population! If it doesn’t move the story forward, if it doesn't tell me something interesting, useful, or important about your character, or clue me in about events, then who cares? Really? Who cares? I don’t mind a stray snippet here and there drifting into the story even if it isn't relevant. I don’t mind that at all, but when the action is routinely hijacked by authorial pontificating or verbosity, I'm taking a cab to the next good bit, and if you keep hitting on me inappropriately like that, I'm outta there.

The first time I felt completely comfortable with this novel and actually really enjoyed the reading was when we got to experience a basketball game in which Jordan is playing. Now this was prose. It was wonderful. But this was not until chapter five, after more than forty pages had gone by! This novel should have started right there and then! It should have been told from one person's, perhaps Jordan's, perspective to begin with, allowing her to find out that she was not alone after a few more chapters had gone by. That would have been a better novel. I found myself hop-scotching over the fat of verbosity to get to the lean meat. Any way, the killer sends another letter to each girl, directing them to a You Tube video (none of which actually exist on You Tube - a mistake IMO) which shows a bit of forest (playing on the Little Red Riding Hood theme), then a long-distance shot of the intended victim. Sarah's video cruelly shows a brief shot of the graves of her husband and daughter before it abruptly ends.

Is this a mistake by the BBW? The killer listed the videos for all three women in each letter, so that they now have the knowledge that they're not alone. Perhaps he fully intended them to meet up, so he can herd them together and kill them all at the same time, flushing them like fish into a barrel before taking them out, so to speak? Jordan takes the bull shark by the horns here, and quickly comes up with a system by which they can contact each other without giving away too much about themselves. The problem with this linking of the victims is that it makes no sense from the killer's PoV, nor does it really go anywhere. For the longest time, even after they get in touch, the three women all act independently. Their introduction doesn't seem to benefit them, and it doesn't seem to make much difference to the novel! It's only towards the end that they act in concert and then Katzenbach pretty much blows that, too.

Even when they have this 'support group', the BBW still dominates their every thought and even their behavior. Jordan, the aggressive basketball player and the most belligerent of the three when they're discussing action, is the first to encounter him in person and know it, yet instead of confronting him she shrivels to jelly and runs! Maybe that was smart, maybe it wasn't. Some serial killers would react aggressively, others would run themselves if confronted. Some might use charm to try and mislead a person into thinking their apparent stalking or threatening behavior was perfectly innocent. But Jordan gives the killer exactly the thrill he seeks, and worse, she fails to use this opportunity to tail him to his car, for example, and get a license plate number, yet she's the very one who is most vociferous in advocating that they should be pro-active in dealing with this! I really didn't appreciate this scene because it isn't like Jordan had not been expecting something like this for some time. For her to go to pieces like that was a bit of a let-down! Yes, perhaps it is what we all would have done, but this is fiction, and I expected more, given what we've been led to believe about Jordan's personality.

What continued to bother me throughout this novel was that these women consistently fail to involve the police. After Karen's initial call, it's never brought up again, like it's still a pointless option, but the fact is there is now three of them, not just one who has had a concrete threat. They have two letters each, and the three videos. This has gone well beyond a prank, or a mistake, or a misunderstanding: they have real cause for concern. They just don't have a suspect, but that's the very job of the detectives, and the inaction of these three women is inexcusable and downright stupid. In addition to that, I find it really hard to believe that not a one of them would advocate or seek police involvement. It's really an insult to women and threatens suspension of disbelief. Yes, one of these three is so cowed by life that she probably would not call a cop, but the other two have been presented to us as quite the opposite of that type of person. Katzenbach has failed to honor the very parameters of the novel he wants us to buy into here.

In the end, the women do act, and in concert, but their action isn't realistic or satisfactory to me. In some ways the ending worked, but I was expecting much more than this, and I felt robbed that justice wasn't served more neatly than what we got.

Undone by Karin Slaughter

Rating: WARTY!

This was narrated quite adequately by Natalie Ross, but she's no Emily Gray. No one is! Except Emily Gray, of course.... What could be better than a murder mystery written by someone called Slaughter?! Well, it turns out, anything! Slaughter was actually the working title of one of my own murder mysteries which I hope to publish before so very long. This one, unfortunately, began in a way that made me dislike it and made me really feel that I wouldn't be around to hear the ending, but it got slowly better and I became ready to give it a fair hearing - quite literally! I should have listened to my first impressions.

The problem with audio books is that you cannot skip the prologue very readily. I hate prologues, but after skipping to track eleven (yes, it goes to eleven) and still finding no announcement of "Chapter one" I felt I had no choice but to listen to it otherwise I'd arrive at work having heard none of it, but what a waste of my time it was. Note that the tracks on this audio version are of the kind where there are ninety-freaking-nine of them on each disk, but each track is less than a minute long. I'm not a fan of that arrangement.

Given that both the prologue and first chapter were pure time-wasting bullshit and could have been entirely done-away with (for a murder mystery, you can do away with a lot! I mean, why not?!), I wasn't thrilled at that point. Had this been a new author, the publisher would have insisted upon it! Fortunately we can self-publish these days and don't have to kow-tow to those people any more, but this does, of course, not mean that every novel is going to be a classic, far from it.

So, finally we get to the mystery, but there's no murder yet! Interesting? Not really. A woman is hit on the highway. She's naked and wandering in the road. She's taken to the hospital where it becomes clear she has been held captive and horribly tortured by some utterly sick person. Detective Will Trent happens to be at the hospital when she's brought in, so he gloms onto the case with his partner, Faith, who happened to be a patient of Doctor Sarah who diagnoses her with Type 2 diabetes. This was wa-a-a-a-ay the hell too much Stephen King style (forget that these are merely notes to flesh-out characters, and include every blessed thing you ever thought of in connection with this novel actually in the novel thank you very much) back-story. I don't care about the life history and three-or-four generation ancestry of every bit-player in your novel. Just the facts, ma'am! Just the facts! And if you insist upon repeatedly including all that extraneous crap I will ditch your novel like it has King written all over it.

Day two of the Undone watch: I had to skip most of disk three as Slaughter got her ass in a sling with some woman going shopping for cupcakes at an ungodly hour in the morning with her toddler. This section was so unutterably tedious and so depressing that I simply skipped track after track after track to get away from it. I may have skipped something important in the process, but rest fully-assured that I am not going back to find it. No fear! Seriously, do I need to know that she got plastic bags, felt guilty, and instead of recycling them, she made things worse by simply tossing them into the trash, and then she undid the trunk of her SUV with a remote and watched it slide smoothly open? No! A thousand times no! Can we get on with the story please, instead of being force-fed yet another miserable lesson on how much you love to hear yourself write?

I also got to hear about Will Trent and his dyslexia. Evidently, Will is now part of the inevitable sleuthing series, and that's fine if you can get away with it, but must we hobble every single detective in every single novel with quirks? And if I have to hear any more about Doctor Sarah and her lot in life I will overdose this CD set with insulin. Can you imagine how godawful this would be if it were first person PoV?! I have a horrible feeling that Will and Sarah are destined to be together, which will favor her a lot more than it favors him. But the thing is, I started not to care, not even remotely, not even a little bit.

I reached disk 6 of this and could not stand it any more. The basic story was pretty interesting and I would have liked to have finished it, but Slaughter prevented me from doing this by her blind insistence upon larding up every corner of this novel with endless extraneous endless tedious endless mindless endless numbing endless boring endless gratuitous endless endless endless nit-picking details in the extreme. I had absolutely no interest in some peripheral character having a stain on his shirt or the life history of a cantankerous hippie witness. I was rendered into a state of completely detesting Doctor Sarah because of the endless maudlin horseshit of her pining for nearly four years for her dead husband. We're told he died in the line of duty and it's hardly surprising if his duty was living with this whiny-assed loser. Fine, make the point if it's relevant to the story, but then do we honestly have to re-live that same point over and over and endlessly over again every-single-time-without-fail that we meet this same character? Did the original hardback version of this novel come with a self-flagellation device?

If this were the last novel on Earth and I was desperate beyond description for a read, I would use the pages for toilet paper rather than read this crap. I'd rather read Charlaine Harris - that's how bad this volume is! To paraphrase Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch, this novel has "...passed on. This novel is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late novel. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't recorded it on disks, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-novel." And it came undone. Rest in Pieces.

The Trial of Dr. Kate by Michael E. Glasscock III

Title: The Trial of Dr. Kate
Author: Michael E. Glasscock III
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group press
Rating: worthy!

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 of any kind for this review.

Shenandoah Coleman launched herself into my life like a kick-ass Femme Vitale on crystal meth. She's an investigative reporter at the Memphis Express, which is entirely unsurprising given her history. She came from dirt-poor roots in Oklahoma, but has taken the reins of her life and galloped herself out of it. She went to school barefoot, came from a family which was racist and despised locally (but not for its racism, of course); she flew airplanes in World War Two in the Women Airforce Service Pilots and now in the early 1950's, she finds a reason to go back to her roots.

She wants to report on a murder trial involving two people, perp (Doctor Kate Marlow) and vic (Lilian Johnson), both of whom she went to school with. To talk to Marlow, she has to go through the town sheriff: the same jerk who cut off her pigtail one day on the school bus. He paid for that by literally being beaten unconscious by Shenandoah. While I can’t condone that kind of violent reaction to something that 'only' involved slicing off her pigtail, I did fall in love with Ms. Coleman at that point! Plus we later learn how deserving Jasper Kingman was of his treatment as we see how appallingly, in the present, he treats Coleman.

How refreshing is it to open a new novel and find myself pulled right into it, and willingly at that, from page one? I can’t begin to express what a real delight it is, especially after reading the last novel with 'trial' in the title! The Trials of the Core looks even worse than I rated it in comparison with something that's as well done as this one is, and the Rose in Rose Under Fire wilts embarrassingly in face the of the blast furnace of a soldier that is Shenandoah Coleman.

Coleman meets with Marlow, and the two glow under their old friendship, even though the luminance has faded somewhat over the years. Coleman volunteers to help in any way she can. She visits the defense lawyer, and has little confidence in him, although he means well. She finds lodging in a local boarding house, but the next morning, all four tires on her new car have been slashed and she soon discovers she's being stalked by an anonymous grey pick-up truck, reminiscent of Stephen Spielberg's 1971 film Duel.

It seems that everywhere Coleman goes in pursuit of her story, she finds a surprising level of hostility and resentment towards Marlow. The prosecuting attorney seems to hate the "nigger lover" as he describes Kate Marlow (and he's not the only one around with that kind of appalling attitude). The victim's younger sister, who found her body, accuses Marlow of being a drug addict who was trying to steal Lilian Johnson's husband, who "obviously" was murdered because she was in the way.

The evidence - which is always circumstantial, BTW - is that Kate was supposed to visit the cancer-stricken Johnson that morning; a hypo containing traces of secobarbital sodium was found lying by the body and it had Marlow's fingerprints on it. Marlow herself was unconscious in her car at the side of a road during this time, and she has no recollection of seeing Johnson that morning. It was not looking good for Dr Kate.

Glasscock's first misstep for me was in bringing in a trope male romantic figure: a sweet, muscular, tight-clothes-wearing, tall, friendly, helpful guy who fits the additional trope requirement of being a down-rev from Shenandoah herself. I was hoping that this guy turned out to be the one who actually murdered Lillian. There seemed to be some suggestion that he could be, and I should have been very disappointed if he was not because then Coleman would have ended up with him. But I'm not going to tell you whether I was right or not. All I am going to tell you is that based on my percentages with such guesses, he probably isn’t, and I will, unfortunately, be as disappointed as I fear!

And that's all I gotta tell ya! Let me conclude by saying that this was really enjoyable. It did not end the way I expected (nor the way I'd hoped for that matter). In fact, the ending was somewhat of a disappointment to me, but I'm not going to take anything away from the way I rate the novel on that account, since, overall, it was excellent. It was very well written, with well-developed characters, a decent plot, and a believable 1950s world in which to set it all. I rate this novel a worthy read and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in period pieces, in "murder mysteries", in heartland tales, and in good, strong, female main characters.

Duty to Investigate by JW Stone

Title: Duty to Investigate
Author: JW Stone
Publisher: Warriors Publishing
Rating: worthy!

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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Errata:
P122 "explosive devise" should read "explosive device"
P133 has an HTML style instruction visible at the top of the page.
P163 "particlaur" instead of "particular"

Here's another disclosure. I'm a bit of a pacifist but I'm realistic enough to know that pacifism cannot hold back naked military aggression. So while I'm against jingoism and saber-rattling, I do also have a respect for and a fascination with the military. I've never been in the military and I don't require that stories be Tom-Clancy-detailed to a tedious and boring level. In fact, within certain broad limits, I wouldn't even know if the author were making it up or was really giving the honest truth, and that doesn't matter to me as long as it's believable within the context of the story.

Duty to Investigate seems like a bit of a clunky title to me, but it’s suitably military! I also have to confess that I was put off by the 'women are sexual objects' attitude prevalent throughout the opening chapters. I know this is a military novel, but that doesn’t mean it has to be chauvinistic - not in my book, anyway! And this genderistic approach isn't through the eyes of the male protagonist: it's embedded in the narration (not first person), so it's not appealing to me at all - but we'll see how that goes. Note that the story is set in 2004 as the military was gearing-up to go into Iraq post 9/11.

Lieutenant Colonel Mike Beck (USMC reserve) is a very successful lawyer of the ambulance-chasing variety, but writ large. He evidently uses women like playthings, and has a secretary who slaves over him adoringly, and for which she's entirely unappreciated. Beck is nudged into a promotion (to 4th Division's Staff Judge Advocate) by a colonel who is a close friend. What Beck doesn't know is that 4th Division is about to head out to Iraq after a bad shoot-out in Fallujah.

Anne Merrill is a news photographer who also works for a TV corporation. She's carrying two jobs in hopes of getting what she wants out of the photography side by giving a bit of a freebie to the TV side, so (again, depending on how this goes), the chauvinism is somewhat ameliorated by this. Perhaps part of the plot here is to show how a man like Beck changes when he meets a woman like Merrill. If that's so, it will be something to look forward to.

So how do these two meet? Well Merrill is like a dog with a bone as she pursues a case where a woman - a veteran's widow - is being turfed out of her house because of underhand shenanigans by a disreputable law firm. After she successfully pursues the investigation, she's granted anything she wants by her boss, and she chooses to be embedded with the Marines in Iraq as a photographer. So along with Beck and Merrill, there goes another guy to Iraq, one who signed up for the Marines after losing his job to the economy. He proves to be an outstanding marksman, and perhaps this is where the root of the problem will lie! But I'm not going to detail any more of this novel - that would spoil it for the writer and give too many spoilers for a new novel.

Well I'm happy to report that Stone pulls this out in the end, and I consider this book a good worthy. Yeah, I had a couple of issues with it, and the insta-love wasn't credible to me; I'd rather have seen that drawn out over a couple of sequels, but it was kept largely subdued, and not gushing. Apart from that, this was a good, solid military tale with some twists and turns and some action written by someone who's been there and done that, so how can I not recommend it?!

The Unexpected Guest by Agatha Christie

Title: The Unexpected Guest
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: St Martin's Minotaur
Rating: worthy

The Unexpected Guest was first published as a play in 1958, and written into a novel by Charles Osborne in 1999. The story is set in Wales one foggy night. The protagonist is Michael Starkwedder (sounds rather like Starkadder, doesn’t it?!). He's an oil engineer who has returned to his roots after a spell in the Middle East, perhaps looking to buy a house there. His car gets stuck in a ditch conveniently outside this residence. Looking for assistance, he enters the house uninvited since no one answers when he knocks on the french windows (why there and not the front door is unexplained, except that in a play, it usefully confines the action to one setting, but as a novel it's klutzy). This is actually why I don’t go to see stage plays. In my experience of them, they have a sour tendency to be pretentious, and the action is typically completely unrealistic.

In the room Michael discovers an old man (whom he later learns is Richard Warwick) in a wheelchair. He apparently doesn’t notice that the man has been shot through the head(!) until the man's wife, Laura, shows up gun in hand and spontaneously confesses that she killed him. Instead of calling the police, Michael sits down and becomes all chatty with Laura about why she did it. Apparently it was because her husband was a cruel and spiteful man. He offers her a cigarette without asking if she smokes, and he observes that she's very attractive. So they sit there smoking and talking.

My first impression was that Starkwedder was a moron, but it turns out that he's a jerk - or so it appears. He seems to want to cash in on Warwick's personal tragedy and profit by it for no other reason than that she's pretty. It occurs to me that perhaps Laura Warwick isn't quite as helpless as she seems since she goes along with his suggestions as they talk. I can see her, in the end, turning the tables on Starkwedder and using him to her own advantage! For no good reason, Michael suggests covering up the murder to make it seem like something else. As he learns about Richard from Laura, he concocts a plan. Apparently Richard was a cruel and nasty person, and about two years previously, he had killed a child when driving drunk, and had got away with it!

Given that the 'breathalyzer' test made its first appearance as early as 1927 in England, and it’s not so difficult to tell if someone is drunk or has had merely one sherry (as Richard lied) even without the test, I can only put his avoidance of all charges as incompetence on the part of the police. The child's father was extremely angry, but Richard's nurse, who was with him in the car, backed up Richard's story and he was cleared. The family had to move from Norfolk (where this happened) to Wales to get away from the publicity. Now Michael's plan is to blame this murder on belated retribution from the child's father.

I have to say I appreciate the twist here, in that unlike your usual detective story, we know who the perp is right from the start! So the suspense here is whether the two of them can get away with murder or whether the police in Wales are more competent than the ones in Norfolk, and will discover what really happened. The police are represented by Sergeant Cadwallader, who is annoying in the extreme, and Inspector Thompson.

Michael's plan is to create a 'blackmail style' note, made up from letters cut from a newspaper and glued to a page reading simply: 'May 15th. Paid in full', the date being the day Richard killed the child. His first mistake (I believe, but we'll see!) is to give Laura the newspaper from which he cut the letters for the note, asking her to burn it in the furnace. We don't know if she did so. He wipes his fingerprints from the room, and instructs Laura to pretend she had a headache and got out of bed looking for aspirin. In this way she can be with a witness when a shot is fired (by Michael) from the gun. Several of the residents then go to the murder scene, and Michael comes through the door carrying the gun, claiming he was knocked down by someone who came running out of the room with the gun in hand, dropping it as they collided. From that point onwards, he uses his real story - that of being stuck in the ditch and coming to the house for help.

This novel started out being rather poorly for me, but once I discovered how it was going to go down, it improved somewhat. After reading Ian Rankin and being disappointed, and then reading John Dickson Carr and being disappointed, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in Agatha Christie, too, to begin with! It appeared to be a sad month for detective stories.

This one slowly grew on me as yet one layer after another was revealed. I did start to think that this would have made a better story had it been combined with Carr's The House at Satan's Elbow and the resultant mash-up has been titled "The Unexpected Ghast"! Despite these improvements, though, I still found myself looking forward to getting past this novel and moving on to a different genre, which is a bit sad. Three rather disappointing detective stories in a row! I'm having better luck with the TV shows! Prime Suspect (US version) continues to please, and I can recommend the first episode of Midsomer Murders so all is not lost! I plan on getting my hands on the novel that inspired that show, it was so good. As for Prime Suspect the shorter format tells a better story than the English original, but the other side of that coin is that it’s rather sad that the US is completely unwilling to experiment or to stray far from formulaic, given all the jingoistic talk of the US being an innovative and cutting edge nation! Not in entertainment we're not!

But I digress! Christie seems extraordinarily obsessed with people sitting on the ends of things - most often the sofa! I found that a bit weird. Throughout the novel I found myself changing the person I suspected as being the perp. Obviously at the beginning, it seemed pretty obvious that it was Laura, but that "fact" changed and so the story itself changed. Instead of being one where we knew who the perp was and were left thinking that the mystery was whether she would get away with it, it returned to being the standard detective story wherein we no longer sure of the perp, and have to figure it out. Methinks 'twas a bit overdone, though!

Just when I was starting to suspect that Jan (the adult with the mind of a boy who Laura takes care of, and who is Richard's young step-brother) might have shot Richard, and Laura was covering-up for him, a new character showed up: a local politician and evidently an ex-military man named Julian who is Laura's secret boyfriend. At that point it was impossible to to tell if Laura shot Richard to be free to indulge herself with Julian, or if Julian did likewise! Needless to say, Michael is a bit miffed at discovering that Laura has a boyfriend! Or maybe the Laura/Julian thing is a red herring and it was Jan who shot Richard after all? I'm not going to reveal it. All I will do is taunt you with the fact that it becomes much more complicated than that!

While Jan shows the inspector and the sergeant to Richard's gun room, which is only next door, Julian leaves, and Michael, now alone with Laura, challenges her to demonstrate how she shot Richard. She does a really unconvincing job leaving Michael to conclude that Laura never did shoot her husband. There are two problems here. The first is that they're speaking loudly, so unless the room is superbly well sound-proofed, the police ought to be able to hear everything they're saying. Michael is now convinced that that it was Julian who carried out the murder. He remarks to Laura, "You've never fired a revolver in your life...You don’t even know enough to release the safety catch." The problem is that revolvers don’t have a safety! It’s quite amazing that crime writer of Christie's stature did not know this.

Even though this started out looking like an open and shut case, Christie kept ripping out the rug from under me as Jan, Bennett, Angell, Julian, Warwick's mother et al were paraded before me. Every time I thought I knew who had done this, Christie turned it around and pointed me at someone else. In the end, I never did guess who had done it, so it came as rather a surprise! I went back and forth in thinking that this was warty, and then it was not, and on and on. In the end, I decided that it was good enough to be deemed worthy!

Confessions of a Murder Suspect by James Patterson

Title: Confessions of a Murder Suspect
Author: James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY! with the stomch-churning bouquet of rotten eggs.

This is the first Maxine Paetro novel I've ever read and as long as we're all about confessions, I have to confess I started out not liking it and continued that way until I hated it. It's a bizarre story about abusive parents who might well have earned what they got! I have read James Patterson before. I read one or two of his Alex Cross books, but I was not impressed enough to start reading anything else of his, and especially not after finishing this one.

I know the cover is largely outside of the author's hands, but you'd think someone of Patterson's stature would have at least some say in it, which begs the question in my mind as to why his name is in something like a 36 point typeface, but Paetro's is about half that size. Does this mean she contributed 50% less than he did, or that she's merely a lesser known woman and therefore, even though she wrote 50% of the novel, doesn't merit equal billing? I don't know. But I'm giving them equal billing and referring to them jointly as Jamax (because Maxames doesn't sound as good, and Paeterson isn't pithy enough!).

The story's told in the first person (the supposed suspect) which I tend not to like as a rule, and the tone of it just irked me for some reason. I think part of that was that these are snotty little rich kids, but that wasn't the all of it. Another big contributing factor is that the narration employs the 'dear reader' and 'friend' motifs which is frankly pathetic unless you want people to laugh at it. The name of the family featured in this novel is 'Angel' but this isn't a paranormal novel, it's just your common-or-garden murder mystery, wiht no murder and no mystery, it turns out!

Malcolm and Maud Angel are murdered, apparently strangled or poisoned in their bed, in their twenty million dollar apartment in the Dakota building in New York City - the same one outside of which John Lennon was murdered. There's no immediate sign of a break in, or of violence other than the murders. Nothing has been stolen and no-one heard anything. The female protagonist is Tandy (yeah, like the old Radio Shack brand), who is their daughter. She has several siblings (Harry, her fraternal twin, Hugo, her younger brother, and Matthew her older brother), all but one of whom were home asleep. There's also her mother's personal assistant (Samantha) who is a resident. Tandy is short for Tandoori (I'm not making this up - Jamax is!), named after what Patterson and/or Paetro claim is West Indian cooking, but in this they're clearly clueless! The tandoor oven is from Asia, not the West Indies! They need a better researcher and they need to wise up about Asian culture so they catch serious mistakes like this one.

The absent sibling, a football (not soccer) star (Matthew) soon arrives, as does their Uncle Peter with the family lawyer, Phillipe Montaigne, who I immediately suspect! (Just kidding!) The lawyer quickly dismisses the obnoxious cops, Hayes, and Sgt. Caputo who (and I don't think it's going too far to describe it thus) abused the kids, threatening to bust into their apartment if they didn't open the door. This is NYC after all.

So if twins are born from separate eggs, and are both female, are they still fraternal twins? Just how immensely deep in our psyche does genderism run?

It's Tandy who lets them in to prevent them breaking down the door. Apparently they were alerted to the crime with a 911 call, but they had no other indication whatsoever that any crime was going on. Tandy told them no one from the apartment made that call. She lied. Hugo made it, we discover much later. The police threatened violence against children. This is NYC after all. Now that the family is assembled, red herrings are being tossed out ad libitum, so we're immediately supposed to suspect both Tandy (who has exhibited violence in the past) and Matty (Matthew, who is built like a brick period) as well as Harry who is a tormented artist, and Hugo who is just plain psychotic. The family gets into a fight about who amongst them had a motive! Yes, this is a seriously dysfunctional family, who are showing no signs of their loss, we get it. Finally, they all go to bed, whereupon Hugo takes a baseball bat and starts smashing up his wooden four-poster bed (I told you!). Tandy has to go comfort him.

For no reason other than this is a YA novel, Tandy also decides that she has to solve this crime! I don't know who wrote the book blurb (it comes from the publisher evidently), but it's really misleading. It states, "Tandy knows just three things: 1) She was one of the last people to see her parents alive. 2) The suspect list only includes Tandy and her three siblings. 3) She can't trust anyone—maybe not even herself." Item one is technically true, but rather melodramatic. Samantha was the person last to see them alive other than the murderer. Item 2 is a lie, since Samantha was also there that night and their brother was absent and has an alibi. As for item 3, unless Jamax is really edgy, the one telling the story isn't going to be the villain. It almost never is! Maybe I should maintain a running cliché count in this review?!

When Tandy finally gets to sleep she dreams, and her dreams are evidently all memories of real events. In this case it's where her father bribed the operator to let them take the three-year-old twins on the Cyclone at Coney Island, which Tandy loves, but over which Harry has massive blue fits, which is a state in New England, too. The kids were seated side-by-side with both parents seated not with them, but behind them. Why two three-year olds didn't literally fall out of the ride is a mystery, but not as big of a mystery as to how, when being carried pick-a-back by her father with her fingers twisted in his hair, she can also be simultaneously grabbing onto his shoulders! Perhaps Tandy has four arms? I mean, forewarned is four-armed, right? Anyway, the upshot of this event is that Harry is further abused by his parents: from that point onwards they treat him like a wimp adoptee rather than a dearly loved son and Tandy is so utterly clueless that she only just then realizes it. At this point I want to strangle Mal-colm and Maud-lin! They are the worst parents ever, as events will show.

Another person in this story who needs seriously abusing is the police sergeant who is abusing Tandy by calling her every name but her name, names like "Toots" and "Tinker Bell". But this is New York City after all, so I guess that's just fine. Not that I'm a big fan of Tandy. She is truly annoying with her "confessions" interleaved between chapters (so annoying in fact that I've quit reading them), which are not in any way confessions at all, and with her bringing up topics and then dismissing them with "but that's for another time". She truly is irksome, and sometimes I hope she did do it so she can get the death penalty and we can be done with her.

The police are coming to the apartment at all hours with no lawyer present, which means that even if one of the siblings did do it, this case is going to be thrown out of court. But this is New York City after all. Uncle Peter discovers that $1.7 million is missing from the pharmacy corporation's accounts (a corporation run by him and Malcolm), and coincidentally, an equal amount is found in a Channel Islands bank under Matthew's name! Matthew offers no explanation for this, and none is to be found in the entire novel.

Peter-head immediately calls Craputo about it and as good as states that he believes that Matthew perpetrated the murders. The average NFL salary is greater than $1.7 million! Matthew is a Heisman trophy winner who plays for the New York Giants. Mark Ingam was a recent Heisman winner and he started on a $7 million salary over four years! Where is Matthew's motive? Note that at no time in this entire investigation is suicide ever considered an option.

Tandy forgets to take her pills - her father insisted she and her siblings take a variety of ten pills every night pills which she could find nowhere identified. Tandy is now determined to find out what they are, and to stop taking them until she does find out. She talks Harry into doing the same. Yeah - way to drop off a daily regimen without knowign what it is and without even stepping it down. Tandy is an idiot, and she's supposed to be the smartest one in the family.

Craputo arrives early that morning. He accuses Tandy of poisoning her parents, and he arrests her for "obstructing governmental administration" along with the rest of her family. What? I'm sorry but while I am interested in finding out what's going on here, I'm also nauseated every other page by the bullshit writing. Jamax is making this story really hard to stay with. Right as of this moment I suspect Uncle Peter, the lawyer, and young Hugo, as well as a double suicide by the parents!

Tandy and all her family are arrested and carted off to jail, charged with obstruction. Their lawyer shows up the next morning and gets them out. The DA dropped the charges because it would be hard to make them stick, and he'd rather get one or more of them on a murder charge. The useless piece of trash lawyer who, if there's a conspiracy here, is no doubt in on it, offers her nothing when he should be filing a lawsuit against the NYPD for harassment. And the press are harassing them mercilessly, too. The fact that children are being subject to this and no one seems to care is what's criminal here and has taken this completely out of suspension of disbelief here. Oh, I'm in disbelief: that anyone could write so ham-fistedly. I guess that's what you get when you write a novel by committee!

So even though they're freed from holding, they do not all arrive home at the same time. While they're waiting for Samantha to get there, Harry calls Tandy's attention to a news item on TV where Matthew's girlfriend calmly announces that she's pregnant with Malcolm's (not Matthew's, but Malcolm's) baby! Tandy searches Samantha's room and finds a locket to Samantha from Maud, in which Maud gushes love. Samantha arrives at the apartment having showered and changed. Wait a minute - Samantha lives at the apartment! She has nowhere else. In fact, the first thing she announces is that she has found a place to live. So how did she shower and change without coming home to the apartment? Just another mystery in a long line of unsolved mysteries. So this novel is now a soap opera, and that soap is being voluminously shoved up your...well, you know where. I need to go get some anti-emetics.

The soap continues to be mercilessly shoved where the sun doesn't even want to shine, as Matthew's girlfriend is found dead, and Matthew is arrested for it based on zero evidence. We hear no more about that for the entire rest of the novel!

After breaking into her neighbor's apartment based on nothing more than a wild hair up her busy-body ass, Tandy discovers that the neighbor has a video tape (DVDs and digital weren't invented when this antique was dredged up from the pond scum?), which shows exactly what happened. Maud decided to end her own life because she had pancreatic cancer and was about to be brought up on fraud charges, and her husnband committed suicide because he's a complete waste of skin. neither parent gave one nano-second's thought to theior children beign charged with murder, or not knowing what these pills were they ahd taken all their lvies, or not ahving a penny to their names. I'm truly sorry that their parents are dead - because they deserved far worse.

Tandy's brain-dead, idotic, jackass, clueless, moronic, dimwit conclusion for this complete abandonment by their abusive jerk-wad parents? Oh they must have loved each other at a Shakespearean level to have done this. Yeah, the lowlife criminal cowards abandoned their kids and left them to rot so they must be the world's greatest exponents of true love.

I'm sorry but this is hands-down the absolute worst crime novel I've ever been insulted with in my life. It's a shameful a waste of trees, which if they had to be cut down, would have been put to better use had they been rendered into toilet paper, because that's precisely what this novel is: a festering pile of excrement and nothing to wipe it up with.