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Jan. 30th, 2006 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperSpoilers for both of these books behind the cuts, be warned. Picoreview: A Season for the Dead wasn't badly written, but ultimately I didn't like it due to the events that unfolded in the story. Hidden Secrets, on the other hand, had wretched dialogue that destroyed what might otherwise have been a decent plot. Oh well.
I picked up David Hewson's A Season for the Dead on impulse while going through the Mystery/Suspense section at Third Place. I liked what was on the blurb, and I thought it would promise me a fairly complex kind of tale. The book did deliver that, though I wound up feeling kind of ambivalent about it by the end. Many of the things I like about the book are not consistently handled all the way through it--and moreover, the actual root of the mystery that drove the plot turned out to be a bit too lurid for my tastes. Also, while the mystery was actually solved, the resolution of it turned out to be destructive for the hero--and I didn't care for that at all. He gets no happy ending. He loses the girl. His father dies. He winds up with a crippling injury and sinks into drink and depression, and the only ray of light is that his boss comes to shoehorn him back into the cop job he quit earlier in the book, by way of trying to keep him from being a totally lost cause.
First, some of the things I liked about the book. Hewson's writing was flowingly descriptive in a way that appealed to me, and once or twice he threw forth a sentence that really rang. So I'll give him props for that. And I liked that the book, while being a cop/murder story, was set somewhere else besides the United States--which rang through pretty well for me just in little details of things like how the characters interacted with one another and the overall ambience of the setting. His hero, Nic Costa, came across as refreshingly different in many ways as well--not your typical handsome rugged cop type that you'd see in a suspense novel written by most American authors. He is described as very slender, almost adolescent in appearance even though he is twenty-seven, and during one of the best bits of the book where he puts on the female lead's raincoat and sprints off across the city to distract reporters from her door (one of the few bright funny bits in an otherwise pretty grim plot), he can be mistaken for a woman from a distance.
And now, the "on the other hand" portion of this review. While Hewson's writing did mostly appeal to me, he had a habit of cramming paragraph after paragraph of backstory in between various current events, which threw off the pacing for me. This was mostly a problem with his heroine Sara and with the villains Denney and Fosse oddly enough, the backstory bits for Nic flowed better into the story as a whole.
The plot, as I mentioned above, turned out a bit too lurid for my tastes at the end. We find out that Sara is really not only the daughter of the older villain, Denney, but that she is also the secret twin sister of the younger psycho one, Fosse. We also learn that what drove Fosse over the edge was that Denney--a cardinal in the Vatican who has gotten himself in serious political trouble--was leaning on Sara to give out sexual favors to assorted persons in an attempt to get himself out of the jam he's in. There's a lot of angst on Nic's part about why Sara would take on so many lovers, and after a while it got a little bit repetitive. So did the "I'm angsting about your troubled past but I'm not actually going to TELL YOU that even though I really like you" behavior from Nic.
And lastly, there was the not-a-happy-ending. Fosse is killed, but Denney gets away and eludes justice. Sara disappears with him, so Nic doesn't even get the consolation of being able to be with her at the end. Moreover, Nic suffers a crippling injury in the final confrontation--and in the epilogue we see him sunk into drink and depression after his father's funeral, being generally snarly and surly and unlikeable as his boss shows up to try to make him stop being Self Pity Boy and drag him back onto the job.
And that left a bad taste in my mouth. I mean, in the real world, if these sorts of events had happened, I could totally buy what happened to poor Nic.
Doesn't mean I want to read about it. And I'm not sure yet whether I got drawn enough into the character to want to go buy the next book about him and see if he rallies from this story's dark ending.
Cait London's Hidden Secrets was also an impulse buy at Third Place--but unfortunately this one didn't click with me at all. I'd been interested since the story is set in Washington State, in the Cascade Mountains. And the blurb at least made it out to sound like a pretty decent romantic suspense plot.
And all things considered, the plot wasn't actually half-bad. It's just that the dialogue London put into her character's mouths was so godawful that I had an extremely hard time reading through it. And I realize this is a funny remark to make given that I was complaining about Hewson's propensity for large swaths of paragraphs of backstory, but the problem is, London went entirely the other way. Her way of handling backstory was to put it all into dialogue, having her characters fling backstory tidbits back and forth at one another in the classic "As You Know, Bob" syndrome. It made pretty much all of the conversations in the opening chapters horribly stilted--and not only because of the "As You Know, Bob" factor, either. The various sentences she had her characters utter just didn't flow well into one another, either.
I kept thinking over and over again of the review I'd seen on this book on Amazon (which I'd read unfortunately AFTER I'd bought the book), wherein the reviewer protested that people just Do Not Talk Like That. The reviewer was of course right. Women who have been best friends for a while do not need to tell one another "I've been living with the guy you boinked in high school for two and a half years now". And man alive, a man and a woman who have been dating for SIX YEARS and who are having dinner together do NOT tell one another all about how the woman has been helping the man out in business.
Further, I was reminded of a column on Romancing the Blog about a problem women authors sometimes have, wherein the dialogue they write for their male characters makes them sound like women. Half of me wants to protest that concept, because the column's overall gist seemed to play into traditional societal expectations of how a man ought to talk vs. how a woman ought to talk--which of course plays into the overall bigger picture of societal gender expectations in general. I try to keep aware of the fact that it's just not that simple, and that there are plenty of men out there whose mannerisms and ways of speaking would strike many observers as "feminine". But on the other hand, if you're going to give me a hero who fits all the typical studly romantic suspense novel parameters and you wind up giving him lines that sound like they ought to be coming out of your female characters without giving me a good strong reason to believe it's natural for him to talk like that, I'm sorry, you've lost me.
What else... points off, too, for setting up a gratuitous "heroine sees studly hero in the company of rival babe and automatically assumes he was with her for sexual reasons, so she gets pissy at him and doesn't actually outright ask him what he was doing with her" scenario. And then she doesn't actually seem to really believe him when he swears up and down that the only reason he was with the other woman was because she gave him a ride on her motorcycle down off the mountain where he had JUST BEEN SHOT AT AND RUN OFF THE ROAD. The heroine is suitably concerned over the battering he has received, sure, but somehow or other she doesn't realize that the fact that her man is walking around IN PAIN is probably a pretty good indicator that he wasn't getting it on with Rival Babe. Meh. Very funny minus five.
And oh yeah, while I'm still on the topic of People Just Don't Talk Like That, let's talk about the various POV switches into the head of the villain early on. How London chooses to do this while trying to hide the identity of the villain from the reader is to have the character talk out loud to herself about her motives and about what she's going to have to do. Buh-huh-WHAT? I mean, sure, I got the clue towards the end that this person was a crackpot, and maybe there are crackpots who would babble like that to themselves about their personal demons--but for me at least this is one of the ways that fiction has to be more believable than truth. Every single one of those scenes read really badly, and instead of instilling a suitable air of creepiness about this person and her motives, they made me roll my eyes.
Points off too for the handling of the heroine's "free-spirited" best friend. The initial scene where this chick Cherry was supposed to be leaning on the heroine, Marlo, to use her budding psychic abilities because she was oh-so-jealous of the fact that she had them and would give her right arm to have that talent, etc., etc., was one of the most spork-in-the-eye scenes for "As You Know, Bob" dialogue. We are then informed that Cherry is living with the studly hero, Spence--but oh no, they're not actually having sex anymore, they're just living together. And we're given a scene where Cherry, after being assaulted, tries to pull both Marlo and Spence into a group hug--and they let her. Cherry begs them to kiss at one point--and they do it. Yet another one of those fiction needs to be more believable than truth things. I didn't have a problem with the concept of the character--just her implementation. The way most of her scenes were written made her more annoying to me than sympathetic.
Towards the end I was skimming so much that I honestly missed many of the details of the final confrontation. So I can only say so much about how that worked for me, but I guess I can say that from what little I gleaned, I wasn't impressed enough to read it in detail. But I did catch enough to see how the little boy over whose alledged death studly hero Spence has been angsting for the whole damned book and from whom Marlo is supposed to be getting psychic flashes is in fact Magically Alive and Living in Chicago Where He's Been Adopted By A Woman Who Has No Connection To the Rest of the Cast Whatsoever. And of course this very child has been watching Marlo on her TV show--and sending her letters. I managed to miss completely how the hell the kid managed to survive the crash that killed his parents--which was supposed to have been tied up with the big kerfuffle that made the villain go postal in the first place--but at that point? I didn't care.
So. Not the worst book I've ever read--but long story short? Not recommended.
I picked up David Hewson's A Season for the Dead on impulse while going through the Mystery/Suspense section at Third Place. I liked what was on the blurb, and I thought it would promise me a fairly complex kind of tale. The book did deliver that, though I wound up feeling kind of ambivalent about it by the end. Many of the things I like about the book are not consistently handled all the way through it--and moreover, the actual root of the mystery that drove the plot turned out to be a bit too lurid for my tastes. Also, while the mystery was actually solved, the resolution of it turned out to be destructive for the hero--and I didn't care for that at all. He gets no happy ending. He loses the girl. His father dies. He winds up with a crippling injury and sinks into drink and depression, and the only ray of light is that his boss comes to shoehorn him back into the cop job he quit earlier in the book, by way of trying to keep him from being a totally lost cause.
First, some of the things I liked about the book. Hewson's writing was flowingly descriptive in a way that appealed to me, and once or twice he threw forth a sentence that really rang. So I'll give him props for that. And I liked that the book, while being a cop/murder story, was set somewhere else besides the United States--which rang through pretty well for me just in little details of things like how the characters interacted with one another and the overall ambience of the setting. His hero, Nic Costa, came across as refreshingly different in many ways as well--not your typical handsome rugged cop type that you'd see in a suspense novel written by most American authors. He is described as very slender, almost adolescent in appearance even though he is twenty-seven, and during one of the best bits of the book where he puts on the female lead's raincoat and sprints off across the city to distract reporters from her door (one of the few bright funny bits in an otherwise pretty grim plot), he can be mistaken for a woman from a distance.
And now, the "on the other hand" portion of this review. While Hewson's writing did mostly appeal to me, he had a habit of cramming paragraph after paragraph of backstory in between various current events, which threw off the pacing for me. This was mostly a problem with his heroine Sara and with the villains Denney and Fosse oddly enough, the backstory bits for Nic flowed better into the story as a whole.
The plot, as I mentioned above, turned out a bit too lurid for my tastes at the end. We find out that Sara is really not only the daughter of the older villain, Denney, but that she is also the secret twin sister of the younger psycho one, Fosse. We also learn that what drove Fosse over the edge was that Denney--a cardinal in the Vatican who has gotten himself in serious political trouble--was leaning on Sara to give out sexual favors to assorted persons in an attempt to get himself out of the jam he's in. There's a lot of angst on Nic's part about why Sara would take on so many lovers, and after a while it got a little bit repetitive. So did the "I'm angsting about your troubled past but I'm not actually going to TELL YOU that even though I really like you" behavior from Nic.
And lastly, there was the not-a-happy-ending. Fosse is killed, but Denney gets away and eludes justice. Sara disappears with him, so Nic doesn't even get the consolation of being able to be with her at the end. Moreover, Nic suffers a crippling injury in the final confrontation--and in the epilogue we see him sunk into drink and depression after his father's funeral, being generally snarly and surly and unlikeable as his boss shows up to try to make him stop being Self Pity Boy and drag him back onto the job.
And that left a bad taste in my mouth. I mean, in the real world, if these sorts of events had happened, I could totally buy what happened to poor Nic.
Doesn't mean I want to read about it. And I'm not sure yet whether I got drawn enough into the character to want to go buy the next book about him and see if he rallies from this story's dark ending.
Cait London's Hidden Secrets was also an impulse buy at Third Place--but unfortunately this one didn't click with me at all. I'd been interested since the story is set in Washington State, in the Cascade Mountains. And the blurb at least made it out to sound like a pretty decent romantic suspense plot.
And all things considered, the plot wasn't actually half-bad. It's just that the dialogue London put into her character's mouths was so godawful that I had an extremely hard time reading through it. And I realize this is a funny remark to make given that I was complaining about Hewson's propensity for large swaths of paragraphs of backstory, but the problem is, London went entirely the other way. Her way of handling backstory was to put it all into dialogue, having her characters fling backstory tidbits back and forth at one another in the classic "As You Know, Bob" syndrome. It made pretty much all of the conversations in the opening chapters horribly stilted--and not only because of the "As You Know, Bob" factor, either. The various sentences she had her characters utter just didn't flow well into one another, either.
I kept thinking over and over again of the review I'd seen on this book on Amazon (which I'd read unfortunately AFTER I'd bought the book), wherein the reviewer protested that people just Do Not Talk Like That. The reviewer was of course right. Women who have been best friends for a while do not need to tell one another "I've been living with the guy you boinked in high school for two and a half years now". And man alive, a man and a woman who have been dating for SIX YEARS and who are having dinner together do NOT tell one another all about how the woman has been helping the man out in business.
Further, I was reminded of a column on Romancing the Blog about a problem women authors sometimes have, wherein the dialogue they write for their male characters makes them sound like women. Half of me wants to protest that concept, because the column's overall gist seemed to play into traditional societal expectations of how a man ought to talk vs. how a woman ought to talk--which of course plays into the overall bigger picture of societal gender expectations in general. I try to keep aware of the fact that it's just not that simple, and that there are plenty of men out there whose mannerisms and ways of speaking would strike many observers as "feminine". But on the other hand, if you're going to give me a hero who fits all the typical studly romantic suspense novel parameters and you wind up giving him lines that sound like they ought to be coming out of your female characters without giving me a good strong reason to believe it's natural for him to talk like that, I'm sorry, you've lost me.
What else... points off, too, for setting up a gratuitous "heroine sees studly hero in the company of rival babe and automatically assumes he was with her for sexual reasons, so she gets pissy at him and doesn't actually outright ask him what he was doing with her" scenario. And then she doesn't actually seem to really believe him when he swears up and down that the only reason he was with the other woman was because she gave him a ride on her motorcycle down off the mountain where he had JUST BEEN SHOT AT AND RUN OFF THE ROAD. The heroine is suitably concerned over the battering he has received, sure, but somehow or other she doesn't realize that the fact that her man is walking around IN PAIN is probably a pretty good indicator that he wasn't getting it on with Rival Babe. Meh. Very funny minus five.
And oh yeah, while I'm still on the topic of People Just Don't Talk Like That, let's talk about the various POV switches into the head of the villain early on. How London chooses to do this while trying to hide the identity of the villain from the reader is to have the character talk out loud to herself about her motives and about what she's going to have to do. Buh-huh-WHAT? I mean, sure, I got the clue towards the end that this person was a crackpot, and maybe there are crackpots who would babble like that to themselves about their personal demons--but for me at least this is one of the ways that fiction has to be more believable than truth. Every single one of those scenes read really badly, and instead of instilling a suitable air of creepiness about this person and her motives, they made me roll my eyes.
Points off too for the handling of the heroine's "free-spirited" best friend. The initial scene where this chick Cherry was supposed to be leaning on the heroine, Marlo, to use her budding psychic abilities because she was oh-so-jealous of the fact that she had them and would give her right arm to have that talent, etc., etc., was one of the most spork-in-the-eye scenes for "As You Know, Bob" dialogue. We are then informed that Cherry is living with the studly hero, Spence--but oh no, they're not actually having sex anymore, they're just living together. And we're given a scene where Cherry, after being assaulted, tries to pull both Marlo and Spence into a group hug--and they let her. Cherry begs them to kiss at one point--and they do it. Yet another one of those fiction needs to be more believable than truth things. I didn't have a problem with the concept of the character--just her implementation. The way most of her scenes were written made her more annoying to me than sympathetic.
Towards the end I was skimming so much that I honestly missed many of the details of the final confrontation. So I can only say so much about how that worked for me, but I guess I can say that from what little I gleaned, I wasn't impressed enough to read it in detail. But I did catch enough to see how the little boy over whose alledged death studly hero Spence has been angsting for the whole damned book and from whom Marlo is supposed to be getting psychic flashes is in fact Magically Alive and Living in Chicago Where He's Been Adopted By A Woman Who Has No Connection To the Rest of the Cast Whatsoever. And of course this very child has been watching Marlo on her TV show--and sending her letters. I managed to miss completely how the hell the kid managed to survive the crash that killed his parents--which was supposed to have been tied up with the big kerfuffle that made the villain go postal in the first place--but at that point? I didn't care.
So. Not the worst book I've ever read--but long story short? Not recommended.