Skewed by Anne McAneny

Title: Skewed
Author: Anne McAneny
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. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Erratum:
Page 212 "...either approving of either..." - too many eithers!

This novel could have been a classic example of how you can get away with murder with me and still get a positive review. All you have to do is tell a good story and have interesting characters and I'm willing to forgive a lot, but in the end, there was too much to forgive here.

Also, I have to say up front that this is a first person PoV novel, a voice I detest because so few writers can carry it off, and it ends up being arrogant, self-absorbed and self-obsessed. In this case it wasn't so bad - and the author knows the difference between stanch and staunch, so kudos there. but the problem remains that there are several serious problems with 1PoV even for authors who can get away with it.

The first and foremost of these is that it doesn’t work suspense-wise, because you know the story gets finished – so there's zero drama over whether the narrator will survive! For example when main character (and narrator) Jane gets trapped somewhere during this novel, it doesn't make for a chapter-ending cliff-hanger because there is no question of the outcome.

Another problem, which became apparent in the way that this novel was written, is the extreme limitation of being a first person narrator: you're stuck with you! The narrator can't relate anything that they don't experience personally, or the reader ends up with long info-dumps, or boring conversations where the reader has to sit and wait while someone relays what happened elsewhere. It's completely unnatural.

Maybe some readers (and far too many writers, particularly those of the YA persuasion!) feel it brings more immediacy, but to me it brings irritation and annoyance. I routinely put books back on the shelf at the library or the book-store as soon as I discover that they're 1PoV, but it's a lot harder to do that with ebooks - and no book blurb ever gives you the PoV!

The interesting thing about this is that the author here evidently agrees with me: in this story, we periodically reverted to 3PoV because of these limitations, and for me it failed because it kept halting the story at the interesting parts while we went back in time, and I'm asking myself: "So now who's telling the story?" and I'm losing faith in the reliability of what I'm being told. Is the narrator reliable? Is the third party reliable? Who is the third party? We don't know. More on how I dealt with this anon.

As I said, the main character is Jane Elizabeth Perkins, the narrator, who's a police crime scene photographer. That is to say, she's a police employee who photographs crime scenes (not necessarily only ones where police have committed crimes...).

She doesn't sound like she's very good at her job, but she does sound like she has a ferociously nauseating case of YA romantic interest in one of the detectives. We get bitch-slapped with this on page eight (this is only five pages in, since the novel unaccountably starts on page three). Indeed Jane's obsession with Wexler is pathetic and worthy of a trashy YA nomance, not a serious adult novel. It seriously mitigates against Jane being a likable female character. She pulled her chestnuts out of the fire with sufficient dexterity for me to let this slide by, but it was still annoying.

Jane and John (who-is-tediously-and-inevitably-called-Jack) Perkins are inexplicably famous as 'The Haiku Twins'. Fortunately Jack was a minor character or I would have ditched this novel on principle. I don't read novels any more which have main characters named 'Jack' because that name has gone wa-ay beyond cliché, past ludicrous, and well into plaid by now.

But I digress. Jane and John's mom was in her seventh month of the pregnancy with them when she was accidentally shot by Grady McLemore when he was attacked by a third party - someone who got away Scot-free since the police thought Grady had shot Bridget Perkins deliberately. Now Jane's getting anonymously-sent photos of the crime scene - photos which seem to prove that there was indeed a third party present at the scene - namely the guy who took the pictures.

John Perkins doesn't have any interest in solving his mother's murder. He's more interested in his run for DA. Indeed, he sounds like a complete jack-ass, so maybe he was named appropriately. There are two things which bothered me at this point. The first is that the author expects us to believe that some three decades after their birth, everyone still refers to John and Jane as haiku twins, and everyone recognizes them on sight. Frankly, that took far too much to believe. The second problem is that Grady McLemore is still alive. How this works in a nation which has pretty much Universal death penalty - and has been that way for decades - is the real unsolved mystery here! Virginia has been aggressively pro-death penalty, so how did McLemore escape the electric chair in 1985? No explanation!

I had thought that chapter one, which takes place 30 years (and zero hours!) before the present was the prologue, and praised the author for incorporating it into the body of the novel (I don't do prologues), but then I reached chapter five and now we're 30 years (and eleven hours) into the past again. This I did not like because now we're not reading a story, we're riding a switch-back and are risking whiplash!

I'm not really very fond of stories that continually interrupt the flow of the narrative and the action for a flashback. I really don't care for a blow-by-blow account of what happened thirty years ago. I care about what's happening now, and the author is denying me that knowledge. So do I skip the flashback chapters? After reading chapter five - a second flashback chapter - and discovering how utterly irrelevant and boring it was, I decided I was indeed going to skip any and all future flashback chapters (there was a bunch of them). Rest assured that I did not miss them.

Those problems solved, I was able to get on with what turned out to be really a rather good novel (previous complaints aside). So Jane takes these photos she received, and accompanied by Wexler and Nicholls - another detective - delivers them to Sophie Andricola, supposedly some sort of Sherlock Holmes consulting detective type, who evidently doesn't grasp that you can buy decaf coffee pretty much everywhere, even in Virginia. Jane wants her to look at the photos and see if Sophie (name means wisdom, you know!) can provide any further clues. Frankly, I'm not sure I understood the point of this part of the novel. Ultimately Sophie's contribution was irrelevant.

Some parts of this story didn't ring true. For instance, Jane's grandfather is ill and when she visits him in the hospital, he re-writes her mother's last words telling Jane something slightly different from what he's previously told her. This is also rather irrelevant, but anxious to know if he's rambling, Jane asks an "orderly" what medications he's on - trying to decide if he's likely to be coherent.

An orderly? Seriously? Is this the fifties and the military? No, if you want to know what meds he's on, you ask the doctor, or more likely the nurse, who is the one who actually administers the meds, yet despite the author being female, we get a male doctor, a male orderly, and no nurse, male or female. I didn't like that and I find it hard to understand why female authors so routinely marginalize females in their work. Maybe I'm just reading the wrong authors?

The author does do a good job of writing a mystery, and of dangling red herrings misleading throughout, and the romance wasn't as god-awful as it had threatened to be with annoying hints being dropped loudly and routinely, but by this time it was too late. I read about 90% of this novel and then gave up because it was dragging on way too long and it was becoming ever more boring. I got to the point where I really didn't care how it ended and I gave up on it. Life is too short, and there are far too many books out there calling. Every one of them (although doubtlessly many are lying!) promises to be more gripping. I can't recommend this book, but this author does have a future, I think.

Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood

Rating: WORTHY!

I first met Phryne Fisher on Netflix where two seasons can be found as of this writing, both of which I've seen. there will be a third series and perhaps more, since this is a real money-spinner for ABC (that's the Australian ABC, not the US ABC!) and deservedly so. I fell in love with Phryne from the first episode. Essie Davis is magical in the title rôle, and the whole show is smart, fast-paced, daring, socially conscious, and majorly fun. Note that the name is pronounced Fry-Knee - which is why the TV series came to be titled "The Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries" - no one wanted to have to teach everyone they spoke to how to pronounce the name!

The problem is that when you're hit like that and become so on-board (with a movie or a show), it's a tough decision as to whether to go to the book, just as it is in moving the other way. Books and movies/shows are very different entities, and the trick when you wish to migrate one to the other is to capture the essence if not the letter. In this case, it worked, because now having read the first in the series of books which kicked-off the shows, I can come down very favorably for both outlets, although be warned, the two are quite different in many respects.

The basic plot is the same. Phryne Fisher is (or rather becomes during this introductory edition) a very feisty, plucky, and successful Lady Detective. She's of independent means, so she never charges for her services, and her cases frequently lean towards supporting the downtrodden. Having successfully and very speedily solved a jewel theft at a soirée she was attending in London, Phryne is asked if she would travel to Australia to uncover who might be poisoning. The TV shows starts with the Honorable Phryne Fisher arriving in Australia and taking up residence in a charming house. The book begins with the jewelery theft and then has Phryne travel to Melbourne, where her roots lie, and where she installs herself at the exclusive Windsor Hotel.

Phryne was originally of exceptionally humble means, and came into money (that story deserves telling, but it hasn't yet been told, to my knowledge), so while she thoroughly appreciates (indeed, luxuriates in) the amenities which money can bring, she has not lost sight of where she came from. Phryne knows Doctor Elizabeth MacMillan, an ex-pat Scot who dresses like a man and is as good as any one of them. She's a physician in a women's hospital and this is how Phryne learns of an abortionist (abortion was sadly illegal back then, even in Australia) known as the Mad Butcher, who like to rape his pregnant victims before he virtually kills them performing his 'surgery'.

Cec and Bert, two Aussie blokes who each have a share in a run-down taxi-cab, find themselves with a girl named Alice, post op and tossed into their cab, bleeding onto the seats. They rush her to the hospital, thereby saving Alice's life - just.

Meanwhile Phryne begins to socialize with a view to becoming intimately acquainted with Lydia Andrews, the poisoning victim. As if these two events are not enough, there's also the King of Snow - the cocaine dealer who has taken up residence in Melbourne with a view to making a killing in an untapped market.

Both the show and the novel have all these ingredients, and the end results are largely the same, but the details are different. In the show, Phryne ends up buying Bert and Cec a new cab to replace their cranky aging vehicle - on the understanding that they'll give her priority when she needs them, but she also, in the show, owns the gorgeous Hispano-Suiza that she drives, rather than just leases it for a week. Dot, her maid in the novel becomes a companion in the TV show.

Detective Inspector Jack Robinson is a much more important figure in the shows than ever he is in this novel, but perhaps, as the series progresses, his prominence will increase. Constable Hugh Collins is a non-entity in the first book, and Dot, his girl-friend, is unacquainted with him. Also Dot isn't the one who pretends she's looking for an abortion. This rôle is taken in the book, by WPC Jones, a female police officer. This is interesting because in the second series TV show Phryne mentions to jack that there are no female officers on force, a rôle which she fulfills independently!

To cut a great story short, I recommend both this and the TV show! My biggest complaint about these books is that you can't find them in the book store! I did find a couple in the local library and I am sure they're available on-line.

The Last Fairytale by Molly Greene

Title: The Last Fairytale
Author: Molly Greene
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with The Last Fairy Tale by Laura Dawn, or Last Fairy Tales by Edouard Laboulaye, The Last Fairytale: Rise of the Princesses by M'tain A Dubois, this last fairy tale is about Cambria Butler ("Bree"), who is a journalist, after a fashion, and on the night when she's heading out to interview someone, she runs into an old college friend named Gen Delacourt. The way her first name is used here suggests it's the pretentious form of Jen, but it's actually short for Genevieve. Gen has a "1950's physique"?!?!?! I have absolutely no idea what that means. Luckily for Bree, Gen happens to be a lawyer. Luckily, because when Bree arrives for her interview, the man she's supposed to interview in his office is dead, possibly murdered.

A complete jerk of a man (remember that for later) named Taylor Vonnegon (note that this is the kind of novel in which no main character can be cursed with having an ordinary name!), who worked with the deceased, finds her in the office looking at the body and verbally launches into her as though she just murdered him. Bree is treated like dirt by the police - improbably so, in fact, almost like a caricature or a parody. It took a lot to try and convince myself that the detective would be like this when it hadn't even yet been established that there was a murder. I failed. This behavior made no sense whatsoever.

Having Gen's card in her pocket from their earlier meeting allows Bree to call her with her legal predicament, and Gen immediately comes to her rescue. When Bree arrives home at her apartment that same evening, Vonnegon (remember this jerk?) is there waiting for her. He says he wants to apologize! Yep, this guy stalks her and lurks around waiting for her to get home rather than simply calling her, or leaving her alone and simply telling the police he was wrong about her, which would be the decent thing to do if you were actually not a self-important stalker dick.

And this isn't the worst part of this novel! Bree agrees to meet him for lunch the next day in order to get him to speak up for her to the police! Gen has no problem with this and she is Bree's legal counsel! So now he's blackmailing her and she still has no problem with him? He admits he knows she's innocent and he claims he wants to apologize and explain, but he's behaving like a complete dick.

Despite this, weak-kneed, sad-sack Bree caves-in to his blackmail and agrees to meet with him - the guy who could well be the murderer himself! I am not very fond of Bree or her smarts at this point, or of Gen's competence. Gen doesn't, for example, even think for recording the conversation with the man who could be instrumental in exonerating her client.

Had it not been for the goodwill the writer engendered in me by the writing she had displayed in the first few pages, I would have quit reading this then and there. As it was, it went downhill fast, and I couldn't get past chapter ten - about 25%. The author had been on probation from that earlier point onwards, and she violated it too often! I was rather desperately hoping that this would not be yet another novel which shows a woman who, despite being completely snow-plowed by a guy, falls in love with him anyway! This isn't a YA novel, it just plays one between the covers....

At the meeting, Vonnegon explains his behavior, but it doesn't constitute an excuse. It merely proves that he's still a dick. He starts out using his guests' first names, then unaccountably retreats to calling them "Miss...". Meanwhile It's painfully obvious that Bree is in love, or at least in lust with this jerk who treated her like dirt. Now she can see how cultured and wealthy he is, this evidently excuses his dickishness, so it's fine to fall in love with him because he's going to spoil her rotten with his riches, and after all, diamonds are a girls best friend, aren't they? Who needs hearts when you have diamonds with which this guy is going to club his mate, and get her spade, er spayed...? Vomitous maximus.

Bree's biggest problem was not the possibility that she could be arrested as a murder suspect, but that she was desperate for a relationship when she was no-way-in-hell actually ready for one emotionally. She's also too dumb to see that. That's what this story (judged by what I'd read by the time I quit at 25% in) was really all about, deep down. It's yet another story about a female character, written by a female author who is telling us that if you're a woman, you need a man to fix you and then validate you, and the best person to do that is the biggest dickhead of a guy that you can find as long as he's rich and studly-looking. How sad is that?

Bree's utter lack of smarts is repeatedly thrown in our faces. It's the lawyer who has to tell her that there's a story here, which she could write: one about murder and corporate espionage. Bree didn't have what it takes to see that. No wonder she's not a real journalist! We're told that she is a writer who does "Bios, press releases, newsletters, website content, ghost writing, book editor, blogs, social media." She evidently has no work at the moment, so how she manages to live the rather profligate lifestyle she pursues, swanning around doing nothing all day and eating out routinely, I have no idea.

Gen is no better. We're told she is a lawyer who chases straying husbands and finds lost pets. Her partner is a Secret service agent, who I am sure gets paid decently, but who is hardly paid richly, yet these two live in luxury. Gen evidently has no work either since she immediately starts working full time with Bree on this 'case' without blinking an eye, yet she lives like she does and eats out routinely without a hint of financial concerns. In fact, the conspicuous consumerism in this novel was not only beyond the pale, it was about two states over from that. It's sad to read about these people who (according to the author's lack of mention of same) never lift a finger for a good cause or a charity, yet they supposed to be the good guys?

It was depressing to have to read yet another story about a female main character as lame as Bree is: one who you know is never going to grow. Her life is going to stay exactly as it is until a guy fixes it for her. How convenient is it then, that in investigating all this, she will be required to spend copious time with Mr Dick Bucks?! And why is she even "investigating"? Yeah, she's writing a story, but that doesn't mean that she's a police detective for goodness sakes. Her name should have been Brie, she's so cheesy and soft.

The two of them begin their investigation by trying to dig into Vonnegon's past. They visit his neighborhood while he's at work, but apparently they've never heard of GPS, because they're using paper maps.... This is where the story was not only bad, but now began to be as boring as a manicured lawn, and I lost all interest in these characters and this mystery.

There was nothing going on, no real activity, no real investigation. Maybe it picked up after this, but in order to get me to read that far, you would have to get me engaged with these characters and I had no interest in them. I didn't even like them! I can't recommend it and I couldn't waste any more of my time with it when there are so many other novels out there waiting to be read, many of which I know will really move me.

Tweet Revenge by Rickard B DeMille

Title: Tweet Revenge
Author: Rickard B DeMille
Publisher: MacDonald, Barclay (no website found)
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. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

This is book one is yet another series - this one to be known as 'the Dawn Johnson mystery series', because why strive for something new when you can keep milking the same idea indefinitely? Hey, more strength to you if you can get the public to buy essentially the same novel over and over again. Microsoft has built an entire industry on doing that for decades! It’s a great business model, but it's not so kind to literature, but hey! that's a small price to pay.

I couldn’t finish this novel because it wasn't something which honestly appealed to me. The writing wasn't engaging and I didn’t find either of the main characters that interesting or appealing. When you find yourself not wanting to re-open the book, and when you do open it, discover that you're having to force yourself to read it, then you have to know it’s time to ditch it and move onto something which actually and naturally compels you to keep turning those pages.

The story switched back and forth between the PoV of the serial killer - some Dexter knock-off dickhead who took justice into his own hands because (he felt) some murderers had got away with it, and Dawn the FBI agent with, shall we say, a somewhat relaxed morality when it comes to justice. The author goes out of his way to make sure we fully understand that the 'good guy' Dawn, is African American and that she's also not a completely good guy in the traditional sense. I am not sure why that was. I mean it’s kudos for having a non-white character in a leading role - an effort which is sadly lacking in popular literature, but if you have to keep hitting the reader over the head with what you've done, it rather detracts from the self-evident wisdom of act in the first place.

Yeah, I know. And the thing is that I kept getting the feeling throughout the portion I read that in the end, Dawn was going to let this guy get away with murder - literally. I didn't read it all, so my view of this may erroneous, but it bothered me - if indeed it does end that way - that this guy would get away with it. Note that I don’t know if it does wind up like that, nor am I interested enough to find out. I'm just guessing, but if it does, then what does this say about our hero, Dawn, who permits this?

It bothered me that Dexter took justice into his own hands, but there were some mitigating circumstances in his case: first, he was sick in the head(!) and secondly, he went out of his way to get convincing proof that the guy/girl he was after actually was the perp. This didn’t make what he did right, of course, but it did offer some sort of explanation that a fiction writer and the attendant readership/viewership could accept.

The problem with this novel, for me, is that I got none of that: none of the effort required to prove the intended victim guilty. Maybe that appeared in parts of the novel I never read, but it was sufficiently lacking in the parts I did read that it turned me off this character (and it wasn't the only thing). That in turn put me off the main character who was going along with this rough justice (if indeed that's how it turned out) being meted out on what are, in the final analysis, truly sick people in dire need of medical help, deadly though they are. Once you sanction vigilantism, you remove the process from all scrutiny and from checks and balances, and you permit one person to be the arresting officer, the prosecutor, the defense, the jury, the judge, and the executioner.

Even aside from that, if none of that happens in this novel, I still had no compelling reason to keep on reading it. There was no hook for me - nothing that made me think, "Wow!" or "I gotta find out what happens next", or that strongly drew me to any of the characters. To me it was boring, just a series of events laid down one after another like so many dominoes.

There was the trope mystery going on here, too - the one which supposedly transcends the episodes and arcs over the entire series. Those things are artificial and boring to me, and this one has been done before. It’s no different from the one undergone by the female cop, Kate Beckett, in the TV series Castle, or by Carrie Wells, the eidetic cop in Unforgettable. It’s not enough for me to want to follow a formulaic and therefore ultimately boring TV show, or in this case to want to read a series of similarly formulaic novels, especially when I'm offered no good reason to do so.

As Chimney Sweepers Come To Dust by Alan Bradley

Rating: WORTHY!

Flavia Sabina De Luce has been banished to Canada! Toronto to be precise. It’s a girls boarding school, which she has reached by extensive travel by ship and train, and on her first night there, due to some extraordinary circumstances (which you will never guess at, so read it and squee), a dead, desiccated body is discovered in her room. And that's just the first three chapters!

By about page two I was in love with this book and with Flavia, shameless cradle-robber that I am (Flavia is fourteen, the youngest of three daughters, the other two of which are Daffy and Feely. I want to meet the whole family). Alan Bradley is a talented writer who reminds me a lot of Gail Carriger - not in his looks, you understand, but in his style - although having said that, make no mistake that this is his style and not hers. If you like Carriger's writing, and you like some Brit in your lit, you'll doubtlessly like this.

I must confess that I'd never heard of the author until this novel came up for review. He's a Canadian writer who evidently has a really good grasp of English life (either that or the Canadians and the Brits have far more in common than ever I'd hitherto understood!). This isn’t the first in the series; there's a half-dozen others, none of which I've read, but which I'm now definitely planning on investigating forthwith:

• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
• The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
• A Red Herring Without Mustard
• I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
• Speaking from Among the Bones
• The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

Fortunately, the stories are apparently self-contained because while reading this I never felt like I was missing any vital information. No novel is perfect, of course, so there were some instances where I had cause to question the writing, or more accurately, the thinking behind the writing, but there was nothing spectacularly adrift with it. It was generally well-written, with no spelling or grammatical errors that I noticed, and the problems were minor.

One of these relates to how Flavia's name is pronounced. The first syllable is 'flay', not 'flahh'. When a teacher mispronounces it, it's understandable, because she sees it written before she hears it, but when the police inspector mispronounces it, it makes no sense, since Flavia has already introduced herself to him by name!

Either this novel was not well-written in this particular aspect, or the inspector is stupid or nowhere near as perceptive as an inspector ought to be! This is a writing problem: you’re so used to seeing the word on the page and reading it rather than hearing it, that you forget that this is supposed to be a view of life - of people living and moving and having their being, part of which includes conversation. You can’t forget that. You can’t forget that words have sounds, otherwise you make mistakes like this.

To balance this out, let me add that I'd initially thought there was another instance of bad writing which turned out not to be so. Flavia knows who Diana Dors is. I found it highly unlikely that a 14-year-old from Flavia's background (even one who is well-educated) would not only have heard of an actor who died thirty years ago, but was also familiar enough with her to formulate the remark which she makes. It was only later that I discovered that this series is actually set in the fifties! This was quite amusing to me, because for the first page or so, I'd also thought the main character was a boy, and even when that was corrected, I'd thought it was a contemporary story!

Other than questionable instances like those (including questionable perception on my part!), the writing is excellent - and very entertaining. Flavia got into a spot of bother in Britain. She was drummed-out of the girl scouts for one thing, and so this hying to Canada was deemed to be the best thing for her. Endearingly, this girl who (literally) dreams of riding bicycles up stairs and running a chemical laboratory, was not in the least bit discombobulated a have this fascinatingly deceased body plummet into her life like a Christmas present from hell.

Here's another minor correction: we're told that the body is wrapped in a Union Jack, but that's a mistake. It's only a Union Jack when it's flying from a ship, otherwise the British flag is called just that: the Union Flag. To be fair, most people get that wrong, and though the author's "Brit speak" isn’t perfect, but he does a dashed good job of it, what? I was impressed.

On her first full day in the academy, Flavia rapidly becomes acquainted with a variety of other girls, but she never really makes friends. Some of those whom she meets, however, she purposefully cultivates in pursuit of her desire to solve this murder mystery. Evidently the body in her room is not the first girl who has gone missing at Miss Bodycote's Female Academy!

The story really starts to pick up when the principal, Ms Fawlthorne, shares a secret or two with Flavia, and this is the start of a trend. There are secrets galore, and weird behavior, and secret societies, and oddball behavior, and secret activities, and did I mention hidden secrets? Lot's of people are not who they seem to be. Through all of this, Flavia keeps her head. She's no Mary Sue, and far from perfect, screwing-up and breaking the rules, but she never gives up on her pursuit of the murderer. She's determined, resourceful, inventive, and eventually, she gets, as they say, "her man" (not that the perp is necessarily a man, understand).

That's not to say that Flavia is a Mary Sue by any means. She makes mistakes, but she's really smart, deeply interested in science, is feminine without being a wilting violet, she has times of strength and times of weakness, she has flashes of brilliance and flashes of dufus, and guess what? here's a YA novel with no male (or female!) love interest at all. How refreshing is that? As happy as I am to absorb a novel like this, I have to confess it makes me a little bit sad to think that it was a guy who created such an awesome and strong female character. How come he can do it and so many female writers fail in the same quest?

This was an especially refreshing read which I highly recommend, and I'll leave you with this amazing quote which made me laugh out loud. It does help if you properly understand British idiom, however:

"How are you finding it?" Merton asked. "Miss Bodycote's Female Academy I mean?"
"Frankly, Mr. Merton," I said, "Just between you, me, and the gatepost - it’s a bugger."

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.

The Indian Bride by Karin Fossum

Title: The Indian Bride
Author: Karin Fossum
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: WARTY!

Translated by Charlotte Barslund (no website found).

If it's December nointh, then we're reviewing a novel which has a title starting with 'I'!

I don’t really have polite enough words to describe how god-awful this novel was. I've read Scandinavian works of this nature before and enjoyed them, so I thought this might be interesting too, but it was just the opposite. I managed to finish the book, because the writing itself wasn't technically bad (although this was a translation, I can’t speak for the original), but in terms of plot and execution, it was without a doubt the most insipid, ponderous, uninspiring, tedious, frustrating, meandering, clueless, vapid, dissipated so-called 'mystery' I've ever read.

I know full-well that in the US we’re overdosed on the formulaic and the shallow, and on the template-driven must-be-tidily-wrapped-in-forty-minutes crime stories from TV. I know the books aren’t that much better, but even when pushing that aside and adopting a more cosmopolitan approach to crime stories, this novel still stands out as being completely lackluster, and so bad it was squirm-inducing. Do police in Norway never ever do any forensic work? Do they never follow clues? Are they really more interested in talking about their sick dog with the prime murder suspect than ever they are in discussing the actual crime? I sincerely hope not.

We're told that the woman was attacked and ran and was finally brought down. We find a suspect with scratch marks on his face, yet never once is the question of whether the victim has skin under her fingernails raised. It’s apparently something which the forensic people failed to check. Seriously? I've never been to Norway, but my instinct is that their police and crime work is very much like it is in the US and any other modernized country, yet if we’re to trust this author's writing, Norway is no better than any severely underprivileged and under-funded third world country for how technologically backward it is! Frankly I don’t believe that.

Do suspects routinely submit themselves to endless hours of questioning without ever having their lawyer anywhere near? The main suspect's lawyer is in this novel for about one page and that's it. We never see or hear from him again! He is never once present when the suspect is questioned. The suspect offers all kinds of support for his assertion that he did not do it, and the police fail to follow-up on any of it. One of his items of supportive evidence is actually proven to favor him - but totally by accident, and it never gets raised again. Is this how criminals are brought to book in Norway - pick someone who seems a likely suspect and interrogate him endlessly without a lawyer until he breaks down and confesses - and then blindly assume that this proves that this guy did it?

I sincerely hope that Norwegian police are not as hopeless, clueless, mindless, and useless as Inspector Sejer and his assistant are. The assistant attracts the stalker-ish attention of one of the primary witnesses, who is a young girl, yet when she calls him to tell him she thought there was a man in her yard watching her, he tells her he's off-duty and can’t help her, and he turns over and goes to sleep. Later she's attacked, evidently by this same man. She calls this assistant and he tells her to call her mother! I kid you not. That's his response when a citizen tells him she was attacked; then he turns over and goes to sleep. What happened to her is never resolved or explained. It’s never even followed up. It’s just let go.

There isn't a single person in the entire town who steps forward and openly volunteers information. Everyone holds back and fails to report important things until they're outed by someone else, or until they finally break down and 'fess up what they know. There's no explanation at all given for any of this behavior. I guess we're just supposed to assume that Norwegians love to let major crimes happen and the perps get away with it! One guy - and for no reason at all - disposes of evidence in a lake. It’s just not realistic that every single person would be like that. There are half-a dozen suspects, yet not one of them is properly investigated. Does Fossum really want us to believe her country is like this? Her people are like this?

Inspector Sejer is the most misnamed character ever, since he inspects nothing! Usually the inspector in a story like this is someone who has something going for him: he's really good at seeing through the trees to the forest (or vice-versa!), or he's is acutely observant, or he's brilliantly deductive, or he's great at getting people to expose their own guilt. Sejer is none of these things. Sejer needs to be retired.

In the old TV series Columbo, Peter Falk played a rather rambling, bumbling detective, but underneath that you knew he was sly and calculating, and brilliant at getting people to admit things they really wanted to conceal. Sejer is just like Columbo, but without any of Columbo's positive traits or results! Instead, he really is slow, dull, bumbling, hesitant, un-stimulating, uninventive, unadventurous; a plodding chunk of sheer boredom. He shows no brilliance in anything. Finally he decides, for no good reason at all, that it’s this one particular guy, who has no solid evidence against him, and that guy's arrested and charged without further ado or investigation. We never actually learn if he really did it. This is a first for me in a murder mystery!

The writer is supposedly the Queen of Crime in her home nation, and I can subscribe to that if the crime is lousy plotting and atrocious execution, but if the title is intended as a positive one, meaning that she's the best, then the rest of the Norwegian crime fiction writers must be a sorry lot indeed. I weep for them, but I honestly don't believe that the writer of this novel is the queen of anything but cluelessness.

This book is one of several in the Sejer series. How this lousy approach to writing a detective series ever progressed that far is the only real mystery here.

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.