Doug Lewars's Blog, page 64

Final Act

Final Act by J.M. Gregson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


*** Possible Spoilers ***
This was a great whodunit. The scene is a television shoot for ... a whodunit. The producer comes in waving a cigar and reviling one and all for an unavoidable delay that was caused by the weather. Soon he is found dead in this trailer and the cross examinations begin. All the actors and actresses who were part of the production are suspects. Everyone has a secret to hide.

The inspector and his assistant are fairly bland characters. Their purpose is to expose enough of the other characters as to provide the reader with hints as to who the actual murderer is and they do that very well. Unfortunately I think one would need to have a pretty in-depth knowledge of the British theater to recognize the significant clue but, no matter, it's a fine mystery and a thoroughly enjoyable book.

If one is looking for deep insights into the human condition you'll have to look elsewhere but if what you want is an exciting mystery to curl up with then I can certainly recommend this book.



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Follow Me Down

Follow Me Down by Sherri Smith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


*** Possible Spoilers ***
I rated this book a three because it was midway between a one and a five. However I found this novel to be one of extremes. Some things I would rate a five and others a one. There wasn't really much in between.

This is a mystery story - a whodunit - and the plot is very well crafted. By the time you open the book at page one, the murder has been committed, the body found, and the prime suspect missing. We follow the story through the eyes of the prime suspect's twin sister who needs to prove her missing brother's innocence despite all the evidence that builds up to the contrary. So far everything is great as one thing leads to another and the reader cannot wait to turn the page and find out what happens next - sort of.

The problem is that the protagonist is extremely annoying and unlikable. It isn't that she's abrasive. It's just that she has no coping mechanism whatsoever. She responds to every little twist and turn in the plot by collapsing in upon herself. If one were to place her in the Myers Brigg spectrum she would be ESFP. Her logical, rational coping mechanism is non-existent. The author explains her inability to cope by creating a backstory in which she is raised by an alcoholic mother who is also a slut. When things went wrong the mother coped by drowning herself in a bottle and our heroine medicates herself with drugs. The setting is a small town and, of course, there are the proper malevolent dark forces stalking her. By page one-hundred I found myself rooting for the dark forces to finish her off but I knew that there were still another two-hundred and fifty pages to go and no author is going to kill off a first-person protagonist and leave the rest of the book blank. By page two-hundred I was hoping that her brother really was guilty and that she would eventually have her nose rubbed in the fact. Fortunately by page two-fifty things do improve and the last hundred pages were enjoyable. Still, in the early going I would read a few pages, be sufficiently annoyed by the heroine to close the book, but then find myself opening it a few minutes later to read some more because I was hooked on the mystery. With of all these starts and stops it took me over two weeks to finish it.

For those individuals who love a good mystery and don't mind a wishy-washy protagonist I can recommend this novel. However for anyone who values rationality I think I might suggest putting this one aside. The mystery is good, the main character isn't.




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Inbalance

I took at look at statistics for the Library of Congress and they have something like thirty-five or thirty-eight million books - I forget the exact number. Now World Wide there are over seven billion people and something like three hundred million in North America. However English is not a first language in much of the world so at a guess, I'd estimate the number of individuals who might read for pleasure to be maybe four to five hundred million. Now these days with television, smart phones, computers, movies and things like Netflix, I think there are probably a small percentage of people who read for pleasure, so, it is quite possible that we've passed the mark where there are now more books than readers.

Library

Frequently when I go to the nearest library, I have absolutely no idea what I want to read. Oh I have a few favorite authors but the probability of finding anything new by them is pretty low. In addition I'm often rushed so I select something that looks like it may be interesting and check it out. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn't. Recently I haven't done so well. I've been reading books published in the last year or so and it seems from an albeit limited sample that the current fashion is to find an interesting plot and then craft the most unlikable character possible to act as protagonist. By unlikable I don't mean villainous. That's okay. By unlikable I mean characters who can't tie their own shoelaces without feeling helpless and then emoting about it. I'm not asking for Conan the Barbarian but even Tom Sharpe's Wilt character would be a big step up.

Hi

I am a writer and a reader. I have a particular fondness for fantasy and humor. I will be including reviews for the books I've read in this blog along with announcements whenever I get off my butt and publish something.