Review: Three Hour Tour by L.P. Snyder
Three Hour Tour by L.P. Snyder
I got this book for one simple reason—it really amused me to think of someone writing a darker take on Gilligan’s Island. And this is darker! Everyone does not come together in a happy spirit of cooperation to make life a paradise on the isolated island. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Three Hour Tour starts slow as the fairly large cast is introduced, but then picks up speed and charges away toward the last page once Snyder finally reaches the spot where he gets to turn his tourists into castaways. Once on the island, things fall apart quickly. The “important man” (think Thurston Hall with bodyguards and even less morals) takes over in what initially appears to be a reasonably democratic way but quickly becomes rule by force when people begin to disagree with him.
Our hero is something of a loner and slips away early on to explore the island and avoid the “bad guy”. To do this, he leaves his friends behind, but he doesn’t forget them. The island is beautifully drawn with waterfalls, caves, a lookout peak, and other exciting and totally believable features. There’s also two surprises on the island which leads to this reading a lot more like Treasure Island than Lord of the Flies.
The tension in the book boils down to a conflict between Dee (our hero) and the bad guy and his guards. Dee is not a violent sort of person, so his efforts are largely devoted to helping people who want to escape the bad guy do so, while trying to figure out how to help those who choose to stay behind.
Then the pirates arrive—yes, colorful pirates—and things turn much darker and more violent. By this point, Dee and his friends have also figured out that they must be very far off the normal sea lanes so these pirates also might represent their only hope of escape. The tension here is very real and the solution works pretty well.
My biggest problem in the book is with the circumstances leading to our castaways being stranded on the island. Snyder spends a lot of time building up a connection between the big bad guy and the captain of the cruise ship. I believed there to be some sort of corrupt deal there. This feeling was reinforced when the ship acts strange coming out of port and the crew starts lying to the passengers. Then there are mechanical difficulties which Dee convincingly points out can’t be what the passengers are being told they are. Then the passengers are put on small boats to be moved to another vessel (the three-hour tour of the title) where there are yet more mechanical problems which open them up to a rogue wave and storm. Snyder never explains what was really going on with the cruise ship and for me it was a major disappointment in the story. If there wasn’t something nefarious happening, he should have stuck with a simple, believable, mechanical problem. Since he didn’t do that, I feel like we were never given the full story.
