RW for February 2020

[Trevor]

Our word this month is 'Bleed'

https://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8...

[Andrea]

Bleeding hearts unite!

[Andrea]

So I tried to listen to but I was bored with it so returned it to the library. Just not my kind of book I guess. Somewhere along the line I changed the word from bleed to blood so yeah...that happened.
I do have one more book to try for the month
I'll let you know :)

[Niffer]

I started The Dead Don't Bleed in February and managed to finish it by March 2nd, but needed a couple of days to think about how to review it. Then I spilled water onto my laptop and have been without a way to post a long review (typing it out on my phone is a pain), so I'm behind on this. But I had a few minutes today at work that I was able to squeeze out, so I finally got it done.

Review:

I finished this book a few days ago, and it's still kind of bugging me. I'm not really sure it deserves 3 stars, but I do think it was better than 2 stars.

There are two main things that bothered me about the book. First, there was a lot of "clunkiness" in some of the action. It was fairly obvious the author wanted the character to get to a certain point (for example working undercover in the clipping business), but wasn't entirely sure how to get him there. It reminds me a bit of some of the less well written fantasy adventure books of my youth, where the main characters would have a series of random encounters and then suddenly BAM!--they would acquire a map with an X showing them where they needed to be when they didn't even realize they were going on a quest in the first place. There was a murder, the main character and his partner went here, went there, and suddenly BAM!--"You need to go undercover." It just felt very awkward.

Second, the main character spent a lot of his time obsessing about not making a mistake, like his previous undercover operation. And then he proceeds to do all kinds of really stupid stuff. "Well gosh, I haven't seen my girlfriend in 12 hours, I should call her and set up a date for tonight...." Really? That's your idea of not doing anything stupid? Um, yeah, maybe we need to revisit your definition of stupid.

At the same time, the author had a really solid grip on the history of the time and I definitely felt as though I were in 1940s Washington, DC, as I was reading. Also his knowledge of both the workings of the Navy and the Communist activity of the time was really obvious. This is really what has tipped me to give 3 stars instead of 2.

Looking at the other books he has written, it appears that this is his first attempt at fiction after having written several nonfiction books about this era and Communism. I suspect he could improve his fiction writing to make it feel less clunky and that this book suffers from being his first attempt at fiction. But I don't feel inclined to read the second book in this series because I don't like this particular main character.