Hour Game

Hour Game (King & Maxwell #2) by David Baldacci

My wife and I read Split Second, the first book of the King & Maxwell series, together. It was the first David Baldacci book either of us had read. After trashing the book, I read other reviews of it. The overall sentiment was that Split Second was bad, but Baldacci’s other books were not; those reviews suggested that my wife and I had started with the wrong Baldacci book. I’d heard this in the past regarding other authors; sometimes the author’s other works proved to be much better than the one I read first, other times, his/her work was consistently as bad as that first book had been. I took into account Baldacci’s success and reputation as well as the “wrong book” viewpoint and decided to give the second King & Maxwell book, Hour Game, a try. Just a few pages in, it became apparent to me that Hour Game had the potential to be just as bad as its predecessor. I kept reading because I wanted to see just how bad it would get. Now that I’ve finished it, I can honestly say that, by a margin not unlike that between The Empire Strikes Back and The Phantom Menace, Split Second was the better of the two.

My review of Split Second contains the following phrases:

--Logistical nightmare

--Demonstrates poor critical thinking skills

--Often, the conclusions are correct—Baldacci thinks they are brilliant, remember—while the leaps that got the investigators there are utterly stupid

--The dumbest thing about the book was that forensics and actual law enforcement tactics have no place within it

All of these things apply to Hour Game, but, amazingly, more so. This second book was longer and its crimes were more complex. This time, King’s magical deductive powers were from farther out in left field and Maxwell’s reduction to literary eye candy more thorough. And still, Baldacci and the concept of maintaining point of view are mortal enemies. I can’t even really tell you about all that or else this review would be about 30 pages long. Instead, I’ll just give a brief overview of the novel’s stupidity.

It all starts in the opening pages when Baldacci rewrites King & Maxwell’s history that he had established in Split Second. He tells us that the events that had led King to leave the Secret Service left him “a very cautious man, unwilling to trust anyone, at least until Michelle Maxwell hurtled into his life.” He then states that Michelle had “taken an instant dislike to the man.” Neither of these statements are true. Did Baldacci remix their history for literary effect like John le Carré had with George Smiley? Did I read an alternative version of the novel? Did he forget what he wrote? Does he think we did?

I vote option #3. What else am I to conclude from an author who uses dental records to identify a murder victim who was shot in the face with a shotgun from a distance of less than two feet? His writing suggests to me that he believes we’re idiots.




****SPOILER****He puts us in the head of his serial killer as he scopes out a potential victim. He describes her as an “attractive woman in her thirties” who drove a bright red Chrysler Sebring convertible with vanity plates that read “DEH JD” and an American Bar Association bumper sticker (really, who puts a bumper sticker on that car?) and wore a nice ankle bracelet. Chapters later, Baldacci tells us that Diane Hinson left her downtown law firm for the evening and “climbed into her late-model Chrysler Sebring.” By this point, we know who she is. Still, he had to tell us. “He went back to the body and carefully unhooked the woman’s anklet, the one he’d admired in the shopping mall parking lot.”****END SPOILER****




The man’s writing demonstrates no concept of logistics. He has one person come home from picking up take-out from a local restaurant in a town he repeatedly notes is tiny and putting it in the microwave. A murder victim was discovered because the police were called after she failed to answer her door and phone while her car was in the garage even though the killer had closed the garage door as he left the premises. In yet another example, King & Maxwell come across the killer in a dark basement with no light sources. The killer still managed to aim his firearm at Maxwell. “The red dot then appeared on her chest and moved up and down her body, seemingly in a teasing manner, as though the person aiming the laser were(sic) fondling her.” This latest one continues a theme of Baldacci’s: the irrelevancy of light.

I sometimes wonder if Baldacci is afraid of women. The way he describes them is so…clinical and delicate. “Her curves and bosom were solidly in the range of eye-catching.” “The door was opened by a young woman wearing a long robe that didn’t entirely hide her heavy curves and inflated bosom.” Who talks like that?

Baldacci has a way of making the most mundane of things seem noteworthy while hand waving the most important events and details of his plot. “Subtle changes in the body upon death were well known to him, and satisfyingly, they were all taking place here.” A novel’s narrative quality is dramatically lessened when an omniscient narrator appears to not know details like this. It makes his writing come across as lazily researched. He details the things he knows about and glosses over those he does not, even when that glossed over piece is the one that is actually critical to the plot.

As was the case in Split Second, the absolute worst thing about Hour Game was the thought investigative thought process.




****SPOILER****King & Maxwell visit the home of Steve Canney to interview his father. The victim’s mother had died in a car accident a few years earlier, so the father is now alone. There were no family photos displayed in the home. The father referred to the deceased by his given name, never as “my son.” From this scant little evidence, they concluded that Roger Canney was not the boy’s actual father, that the boy’s mother had an affair with the richest man in town, and that Roger was well off because he was blackmailing the rich man. King also later concluded that one of the rich man’s sons, believed to be mentally retarded, had actually been born with syphilis and that the STD was the actual cause of his brain injury and the cancer that eventually killed him.****END SPOILER****




David Baldacci does not write crime solving novels. They are, instead, tales of fantasy, unwittingly written Inspector Gadget fan fiction. He demonstrates no knowledge of actual science and technique. Anyone who’s ever used a cell phone knows that the location from which a call was placed or answered can be tracked. Baldacci’s investigators didn’t.

There is too much farcical nonsense in this book to catalogue it all. Surgeries performed by a husband on his wife. Previously bound hostages whose hands and feet were unbound before they were thrown into a locked room. An escape from jail using tools extracted from a fake vein in a man’s arm. Drug deals in which the purchaser drove away in an antique car. Even the attempts on King & Maxwell’s lives were ludicrous.

The coup de grâce, the scene that made reading Hour Game worth the time I spent, was the most ridiculous scene I’ve ever read. On a dark and stormy night, Michelle and the killer tracked each other looking for a kill shot.

One lightning flash; that was all she needed. She edged around the bush, backtracked a bit and then slowly made her way down and around with the goal of coming up behind Eddie.

The flash of lightning. She heard the noise to her right. She pivoted and fired in the same instant. There was an explosion in front of her as a spark of red-hot light erupted for an instant and then vanished.

She couldn’t know it, but Eddie had at the same time been circling around her and had fired at the exact same instant as she. Beating odds of probably a billion to one, the two bullets had collided, causing the explosive spark she’d seen.

Yeah, he really wrote that. Colliding bullets was the high point of his climactic scene. Really, that’s all you need to know. Hour Game was craptastic. I’ll try reading something good next time.

F

This is Where I Leave You

This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

This is Where I Leave You is smart and funny. Laugh out loud funny. More importantly, it captures the realities of family life. Most of the trials and tribulations faced by the Foxman family are familiar to all families in the United States, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, wealth, and every other thing that divides us so. In these ways, this was one of the more brilliant novels I’ve read in the past few years.

This is Where I Leave You is told in first person from the perspective of Judd, a thirty-something Jewish man living in a rented basement room because his house is occupied by his wife and his boss. Theirs is an affair he discovered when he came home from work early one day. It’s a familiar cliché, but Jonathan Tropper does it in an original and unforgettable manner. In the novel’s opening sentence, we learn that Judd’s father has died. Judd learns that his father’s dying wish was to have his family sit shiva, so Judd joins his mother, sister, and two brothers—whom he can only stand to varying degrees of not very much—for a week of togetherness. This togetherness does not exactly drive the plot, but it is what This is Where I Leave You is about.

Tropper’s imagery is superb. His character development is even better. From Judd to his sister’s six-year old son to his wife’s new beau, each character is distinct; each has his/her own path we can follow. They are all whole people. And they all fit, even when they don’t. The novel’s greatest strength is that nothing feels pasted on.

I didn’t love it, though. It was too judgmental for my liking. A lot of that is Judd the character speaking, but there are some instances where it came across to me as the author’s feelings on the world. There was too much fat-hate for my taste. And I’m left wondering if the woman issues are just Judd’s or the author’s. As brilliantly written This is Where I Leave You was, it is entirely possible that my projections were wrong. I will definitely read Tropper again, so I will find out.

In a world of suffering we have two extremes: the boot strappers and the woe-is-me-ers. I don’t particularly like either. Judd is a wo-is-me-er, and I found it difficult to empathize with him. He was never good enough, never attractive enough, never physical enough. He was never able to get the beautiful girl—and when he did, she had a physical defect. He feels sorry for himself. He spends much of the novel in a pseudo-midlife crisis, even though he’s about fifteen years too early for it. he can’t just want a woman or love a woman; he has to save a woman. “I could never resist a crying girl,” he says. “I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s probably not something good.” Later he recognizes, “I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don’t know.” Judd is the kind of man who laments that the beautiful women who want nice guys never look at him. He’s the guy who wants what he thinks he can’t have while never realizing that he could have and would have had it had he ever put out any effort. Instead he makes up ways in which he’s better than this person or that; he cannot uplift his own self-worth, so he puts down everyone else’s. Judd feels like the world owes him something, yet he’s never manned up to what he needs to do for his own life. Even his successes in this story turn out to just be moments of resignation or weakness in others. In short, I found it hard to empathize with him. This book doesn’t work as well as it’s supposed to if you don’t at least like Judd. I didn’t…at all.

There was too much I didn’t like to rate it very high, but it was too smart, too funny, too beautifully written, and too likely to be reread to rate low.

B

Split Second

Split Second (King & Maxwell #1) by David Baldacci

This book was so bad, so poorly written, so, so, so massively wrong that I wonder if I had a bad copy, that an unedited version somehow made its way to my Kindle. I just can’t believe that a novel that sold so well, that began a very popular series which led to a television show, was so bad. Split Second was barely readable. In fact, I only finished it because my wife and I had decided to read it together.

The first novel of the King & Maxwell series, Split Second follows two disgraced Secret Service agents. One, Sean King, was caught looking away when the presidential candidate he was guarding was assassinated. The other, Michelle Maxwell, allowed the presidential candidate she was guarding to be alone in a room for a few minutes; he was kidnapped. It is obvious that the two cases would wind up connected to each other. That’s fine. The book has good premise, something that could serve as the base for an engrossing tale. Unfortunately, Split Second deteriorated into absurdity.

My overall impression of the novel is that it reads like a young adult or early teen detective story. Everything is fully explained as if the reader is not expected to figure out things for him or herself. This style leads to the dragging out of many storylines that a reader should figure out fairly quickly. One of the major ones is what exactly distracted Agent King while his candidate was killed. About 20% into the novel, I told my wife what I thought that distraction was. She said, “No. That’s what he wants you to think, but it wouldn’t be something that stupid.” Around the 40% mark, it became clear that no other explanation was possible, and it was confirmed later in the novel. And, yes, it really was that stupid.

I’ve said this about other books I’ve reviewed, but Split Second is a logistical nightmare. The author does a poor job of establishing and maintaining point of view, so much of the narration is a mess. For example, federal investigators in Virginia make preparations to storm a bunker in Tennessee. Instead of flying there, they drive five hours. Why?

Baldacci’s text also demonstrates poor critical thinking skills in his characters. King and Maxwell, we are told, are brilliant investigators. Much of the time, though, they come across as stupid. In one scene, Michelle Maxwell is searching through an old hotel that was abandoned 7 years prior. She found a phone book in the abandoned office, but was disappointed to find it was out of date. What, did she expect Ma Bell to continue its delivery to the abandoned building? Within the novel, we read through the investigators’ thoughts, we experience the processes that take them from clue to conclusion. Often, the conclusions are correct—Baldacci thinks they are brilliant, remember—while the leaps that got the investigators there are utterly stupid. In short, he tells us they are good while showing the opposite to be true.

There was no reason for Split Second to be as long as it was. The most common narrative trick the author used was: I’ve discovered something, but I’m not going to tell you now; I’m going to tell you later, but before I can tell you, I’ll be drugged, kidnapped, or knocked unconscious. That got old…quickly.

The dumbest thing about the book was that forensics and actual law enforcement tactics have no place within it. A few seconds after the assassination, Sean King shot the man who killed his candidate. The investigations within Split Second reveal that there was a second person at the scene with a gun. That person made a point to hide the gun, pay blackmail fees to a woman who saw him hide it, and then spend years contriving all of the foolishness that makes up the plot. The question that’s never asked in the book—let’s face it; had it been asked, the author would have had to think up another plot—is why the gun was an issue at all. It was neither pulled nor fired at the scene. Nothing criminal occurred with it, and there is no proof of anything involving it. In real life, that gun is a nothing; in the pseudo-plot of Split Second, it was everything. That doesn’t work for me.

In some cases, Baldacci writes King and Maxwell coming to conclusions that are scientifically impossible. For example: “She rewound the tape again and listened intently. There it was, like a beep or a clang, or a ding. That was it. A ding! It was coming from the direction where King was staring.” So Michelle Maxwell has the ability to tell sound direction from watching a VHS tape? That was almost as bad as the cold fusion bomb in JJ Abrams’ latest Star Trek film.

This book was awful. It was so awful that I almost want to read the second King & Maxwell book to see if this was an anomaly. If you’re looking for a good, exciting, smart thriller, stay away from Split Second.

F

How Green this Land, How Blue this Sea

How Green this Land, How Blue this Sea by Mira Grant

Upon finishing, the first thing that sticks out to me about this Newsflesh novella is how well Mira Grant writes through Mahir. He is a great narrating character. Travelling throughout zombie-infested Australia in his head was a fun experience that reiterated how much I hated reading from Shaun’s point of view in Deadline and Blackout.

The best thing about How Green this Land, How Blue this Sea is Grant’s portrayal of Australia. It was a different type of environment than any of the other settings for the Newsflesh series. Post-zombie apocalypse Australia is a place where people refuse to trade in their freedoms for protections. The people there don’t live with the same fear and isolation that is experienced in the North America and Europe of Grant’s world. It was a different atmosphere with a different feel. It helped to show how the world she created is an actual diaspora, not a monolith of fear and undead.

Although this was a rather short piece, Grant managed to include a few interesting ideas. The most significant is what her Australians have done with the rabbit-proof fence. All in all, I’d say this was a very thoughtful story. Great companion to the series.

A-

Perfect Rivals

Perfect Rivals: Notre Dame, Miami, and the Battle for the Soul of College Football by Jeff Carroll

This book was a huge letdown. I knew the book was published by ESPN Books, so I thought it might actually be a mostly objective, unbiased account. That was naivety on my part. I should have done more research before reading it—I should have known going in that it was written by an Indiana guy who writes for a South Bend newspaper. Had I known, I would have never begun reading it.

I found author Jeff Carroll to be very fair when it came to describing former Miami coach Jimmy Johnson (but for every positive or neutral thing he had to say about Johnson, he had three negative things to say about his successor, Dennis Erickson). I thought his writing was rather impartial in a lot (but not all) of the discussion about Notre Dame football. That was it, though. Everything else was a mixture of cultural bias, bowing at the altar of the Golden Dome, and poor knowledge of the game of football. There was also plenty of misinformation produced by either lazy research or piss poor fact-checking.

The full title was Perfect Rivals: Notre Dame, Miami, and the Battle for the Soul of College Football. That title would lead a prospective reader to believe he/she was about to read about the classic battles between the two teams in 1988, 1989, and 1990 as well as the significance those games had on the state of college football. Nope. The 1990 game was treated as a near afterthought. Not much time was given to the 1989 game (Miami won the national championship that season). Carroll spent a good deal of time on the 1988 game, but it wasn’t the book’s centerpiece. I don’t understand that decision. That game should be the centerpiece of any non-school specific book about college football in the 1980s. Perfect Rivals was about the two teams who played in that game, yet it was, in my opinion, given a lower billing than what was warranted. A more accurate subtitle would have been How Lou Holtz took risks and brought Notre Dame back to the pinnacle of college football just in time to sign an exclusive television contract with NBC.

One of the more darkly ironic moments comes when Carroll rants about Bill McCartney’s Colorado Buffaloes, specifically accusations of rape and the coach’s non response to them. Carroll could have written the same things about his own beloved school.

But Carroll seems to buy into the Notre Dame myth. This passage, quoted in the book from Inside Sports magazine sums up the myth:

College football needs Notre Dame, and the Irish have resurfaced just in time. In an era when the concepts of athletic excellence and academic integrity fit together like White Snake and Bing Crosby, there is no better time for major college football’s most famous symbol of athletic integrity to be on top of the football polls…Who knows? Perhaps Notre Dame’s football resurgence will bring the academic ideal back into style. Perhaps integrity will be the game’s next popular fad, like four-receiver sets or steroids.

My biggest issue with the book was the constant peppering of ignorant culturally based statements. Predictably, I disagreed with nearly 100% of what Carroll had to say about the Hurricanes’ performances on and off the field leading up to the 1987 Fiesta Bowl. But that stuff turned out to be mild. About the Islamic Clara Muhammad School in Newark, New Jersey, which Raghib Ismail attended as a child, Carroll wrote, “It is a relic of the time period that a black man would choose to navigate the world as a Muslim rather than as an African American ancestor of slaves in America.” That statement demonstrates a severe lack of knowledge. A few paragraphs later, Carroll described the Ismails’ move from Newark to Wilkes-Barre: “There was one condition: that the boys attend a Protestant church, not a mosque…On another positive note…”

Carroll’s poor use of transitions give the reader a sense that he just doesn’t care about the players as people. “Rice’s career had ended without a second national championship. Without the Heisman. Without a place at the highest level of the sport. In this darkest of moments, however, true Irish believers could take solace in the famous line from the school’s fight song. ‘Old Notre Dame will win overall,’ it went, and it was about to be proven true in a way that would rattle the college football world to its very core and change Notre Dame’s reputation forever.” Who cares that Tony Rice wasn’t drafted? Who cares what his future held? Notre Dame was about to sign a huge TV deal, and the Irish faithful were elated. Give me a break.

The presentation of untruths was the book’s biggest blemish. A 1987 Pitt loss to Temple was described as “the ultimate indignity” because Temple had “gone winless in eleven games” the previous season. In real life, the 1986 Temple Owls were a 6-5 team. Those 6 wins were forfeited in 1988 after it was revealed that a Temple player had played that season after taking money from an agent. The truth paints an entirely different picture over Pitt’s loss to Temple and whatever baggage the players would carry from that loss into their game with Notre Dame. Carroll also wrote about Michael Irvin, “Johnson’s volatile former ‘Cane, whom the Cowboys had nearly given up on by the time Johnson arrived.” No. When Jimmy Johnson arrived in Dallas, Irvin had just completed a rookie season during which he led the NFC in yards per reception after being selected 11th overall in the draft. The Cowboys were elated with him then. They considered moving on from him after his second season, Johnson’s first in Dallas, because they were unsure he’d be able to recover from an injury. The one that bothered me the most was a statement about how the BCS led to a split national championship in 1997 even though it was supposed to prevent that sort of thing. The BCS did not exist prior to 1998, so I don’t know how Carroll holds it responsible for Michigan and Nebraska sharing the championship.

Bad information and poor fact-checking make me doubt everything I read in a work. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what the author failed to understand or what he/she misrepresented to an exaggerated degree. This is a history book, but I cannot trust the history it gave me. Overall, I feel that Perfect Rivals was a waste of my time.

D

The Forever War

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

The Forever War is that rare novel that begins with a fairly strong start and continuously gets better until it ends. It was enjoyable and thought provoking. I’ve read several reviews that suggest The Forever War’s time has come and gone or that its time has come, gone, and come back again due to the cyclical nature of life. I disagree. It is, in my opinion, a timeless classic. When, in the course of human history, have themes of upward mobility, senseless war, politically created enemies, conscription, and veteran life ever been irrelevant to current life? The Forever War is one of the best war novels and one of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read. It is technical and emotional. It exercises the brain. And it tugs at the heart.

Haldeman’s plot follows William Mandella as he leaves earth to train for war against a recently discovered “enemy” from a foreign planet. Mandella’s story takes us through many planets and star systems to fight war against the Taurans. As we follow Mandella’s path, Haldeman touches on many topics: homosexuality, poverty, crime, corruption, the meaning and concept of home, and others.

Interstellar travel puts the soldiers on a different time scale than those who remain on one planet. The first time Mandella returns to earth, he finds his mother an old woman and life on his home planet much different than it was when he first left. For him and his team, it is a different world. This is an area in which Haldeman’s text shines.

The novel features a great deal of science, both in jargon and in the use of real and fictional (speculative) science. It works for me. The science was neither silly nor just shoe-horned in. It all makes sense. It would be very easy for poor science to turn a military science-fiction story into something silly and cartoonish. At no point does The Forever War seem in danger of taking that fall. This is a real world type of novel, and Haldeman’s science helps reinforce it.

At its heart, though, I think The Forever War is a love story. A serious adult love story. It is not a story about smitten lovers who gaze into each other’s eyes and see milk, honey, and heaven. No, these are real world people who have a real world love and deal with real world problems. What is their place in the world? Can they afford to be together? Will their jobs allow them to be with each other? William and his woman are, quite literally, star-crossed lovers. Haldeman avoids caricaturizing their relationship. Instead, he stays true to it and, without ostentation and loud warning bells, creates something endearing and heartfelt. That relationship, that love story, is what I will think of first when I think of The Forever War.

What a great, great book.

A+

Gone Girl

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Told in three parts, Gone Girl tells the story of the marriage of Amy Elliott and Nick Dunne. While reading Book 1, one gets the feeling that Nick is the story’s protagonist. By the time I reached Book 2, I realized that the actual protagonist is the marriage. More specifically, the lead role is that of the conch of power within the marriage.

In some ways, this is the most horrifying of Flynn’s novels. Whereas Sharp Objects and Dark Places occur decades after the horror that initiates the action, Gone Girl takes you through all of the horror as it happens. It’s good, but it could have been great.

Gone Girl is Gillian Flynn’s third novel. It was very much a Gillian Flynn novel. I like it, but I did not love it. I probably would have liked it a lot more if I hadn’t read both of Flynn’s first two novels. I might’ve enjoyed it more had I read it without knowing who wrote it. This was a novel whose impression on me was damaged by my familiarity with the author. Throughout Book 1, I felt I knew what was coming, that everything I was reading was a lie.

Flynn utilizes the alternating POV chapter technique that she used to near perfection in Dark Places. Odd-numbered chapters are told from Nick’s point of view; the even-numbered ones from Amy’s. In Book 1, which builds the story and interest, Amy’s portion of the story is told through selected diary entries.

The middle, Book 2, was not solid. In fact, it bored me. Now that I’m finished with the book, I find Book 2 unnecessary. More damning, I think it killed the suspense that Book 3 would have carried. Flynn has a tendency to fully explain her reveals. It answered questions before they were asked. At a macro level, I understand why Flynn included it. Much of Gone Girl’s social commentary resides there. It took away from the story she was trying to tell, though. It hurt the novel. Book 2's biggest flaw is that its version of Amy reads false compared to every other version of her that we see (Book 1, Book 2, and testimony of other characters). By the end of that section, Gone Girl was a D+ novel.

In Book 3, Flynn ties everything together into a very good ending. It takes a story and people you know and creates a very realistic hell on earth. It might be the best ending of her three novels. It is definitely the most frightening of her endings.

Gone Girl was uneven. Solid beginning; boring, meandering middle. Gillian Flynn stuck the landing, though, and that saved it.

C

Dark Places

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places was a much more ambitious, daring, and expansive than was her debut, Sharp Objects. In her second novel, the author takes the themes of the first—family, entitlement, privilege, patriarchy, and healing—flips them into their opposites—poverty, desperation, fear, and hopelessness—and examines the relationships between them, specifically the self-sustaining cycle they maintain. In this novel, Flynn also solidifies her status as a master at crafting small town and rural American life; she proved that Sharp Objects was no fluke.

Dark Places goes back and forth between Kansas City in 2009 and rural Kansas in January 1985. The 2009 chapters are told in a first-person point of view by Libby Day, who was seven years old when her mother and sisters were murdered in 1985. The earlier year’s chapters follow Libby’s mother and brother, Ben, who was convicted of the murder charges, from a third-person view as they live the 24 hours prior to the murders.

Libby escaped death by hiding in her mother’s closet and then escaping out of the window. Hiding out in the woods all night made her a victim of frostbite. When we meet her, she’s missing three toes and half a finger. 2009 Libby is a friendless loner. She lacks social skills and interaction. She lives a life you’d find unsurprising of someone who is the only surviving witness to the slaughter of her family. Up to the novel’s opening, her life was financed by well-wishers who donated to a fund for her. As the funds run out, Libby is forced to discover some other way to sustain herself. That desperation leads her to members of a Kill Club, people obsessed with famous killings. No one in the club believes Ben was actually responsible. Libby’s testimony is what put him away, which means the club members are not fans of her. She needs money, though, and she’ll put up with them long enough to make some money investigating the case for them. The heart of Dark Places is Libby’s journey of discovery.

I got into Libby and her mother right away. I think it took a few chapters for Flynn to feel comfortable with Ben’s voice. She never fully captured it, in my opinion, but she came close enough to do a credible job and say what she wanted to say.

The dichotomy between Ben’s and his mother’s growing desperation and hopelessness as they traverse through that fateful day is one of the more brilliant aspects of the novel. As each navigates his/her day, they commit actions that inadvertently, yet directly, affect the other. As Libby, who never examined or paid any attention to any aspect of the case after Ben’s conviction, begins the process of trying to piece things together, we readers learn how much everything—in life, not the story—is connected. To what do we expose our children? How much do we underestimate them? How often do we push them to lie under the guise of telling the truth? It doesn’t just point out the world’s problems, though; it also tries to get at the roots. How did we get here? What’s keeping us here? What are we afraid of?

What I consider to be the book’s biggest flaw is that, in my opinion, Chapters 33 and 40 were unnecessary. Readers should have been able to figure out all that was revealed in those chapters without their inclusion. Flynn had given us all the necessary clues.

One thing that I love about Dark Places is that no guns were left on the table, even those that seem like throwaways. This was the near flawless execution of a thoroughly conceived plan. When all is said and done, this may be remembered as Gillian Flynn’s masterpiece.

What I loved most was Libby. She was tough and brave, but not too much of anything. She was a survivor, but a believable one. Along with Mira Grant’s Georgia Mason and John Irving’s Ruth Cole, Libby Day is one of my three favorite female protagonists. Great character.



A

Terms of Enlistment

Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos

I quit at the 24% mark. Not a lot had happened up through that point. The protagonist, Andrew, went through basic training and received his assignment. Prior to enlisting, he lived in a Boston area Public Residence Cluster, which seems to be a futuristic version of the projects. Other than that, it’s just an expository dump of military life in 2108 North America. There is no sense of what actual life is like, what the government is up to, or who the enemy is. There’s just nothing…except things that don’t quite add up.

The first 24% of this book is filled with contradictions. The biggest is that the narrator speaks and thinks like a highly educated person, not someone who grew up in an area where nothingness persists, which is how life in the Public Residence Cluster is described.

Overall, there was no semblance of a story forming by the time I quit. And the voicing is all wrong. The protagonist doesn’t feel like an actual person. I should have quit at eh 4% mark, when I read this: “I spend my final night in PRC Boston-7 reading the last fifty pages of Moby Dick. Tomorrow, I will have to leave the book reader behind. I’ve read the novel a dozen times or more, but I don’t want to leave it unfinished now, forever bookmarked at the spot where the Pequod slips beneath the waves.” Moby Dick? That’s a sign of a bad book.

The final straw, the passage that made me put it down for good was this: “Jackson is an equally tall and thin black girl. She wears interesting tattoos under her eyes, some sort of tribal pattern.” Good day, man.

D

Sharp Objects

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

No good fiction is actually about the plot. A horrifying tale about family, entitlement, privilege, patriarchy, and healing, Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects is no different. The plot involves the investigation of child abductions and murders. I felt many things while reading this book. “Good” was not one of them. This was a novel that twists and turns you, churns your stomach, and makes you feel sick inside—all while being beautifully written.

I used phrases like “lacked continuity”, and “logistical nightmare” to describe the previous book I read, so, clearly, Sharp Objects is a bit of a rebound for me; still, Flynn’s prose sucked me in from the very beginning. This was a beautifully written novel with details that provide a perfect picture of the setting, history, people, and circumstance. During much of my reading time, I was in Wind Gap, Missouri, and not lying on my bed staring at my Kindle. Flynn’s writing captured me.

Certainly, Sharp Objects is not for everyone. The protagonist, Camille, is a cutter. She has carved words all over her body with, well, you know the title. Both her sexual history and sexual present are disturbing, yet, unfortunately, not uncommon.

Camille’s mother, Adora, is the worst mother I’ve ever come across in fiction. Compared to Adora, Joan Crawford is Claire Huxtable. The star, though, is Camille’s half-sister, Amma. A “Hit Me Baby One More Time”-era Britney Spears crossed with the little boy from the “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone. Only 13 years old, Amma runs Wind Gap. She’s precocious, beautiful, brilliant, and pure evil.

When Camille, a newspaper reporter in Chicago, returns home for the first time in eight years to investigate a child abduction, she realizes that everyone in town is afraid of Adora and Amma. Trying to help solve an abduction, which turns into a pair of murders, Camille is forced to confront all of her hurts, all of her weaknesses. And she can’t seem to stay away from Adora and Amma’s bad sides.

I loved Sharp Objects. I’ll probably read it again. I can’t wait to read the rest of Flynn’s work.

A-

Extinction Point

Extinction Point by Paul Antony Jones

NOTE: Whenever passages from the book are quoted, all emphases are mine.



This review is full of spoilers. I can’t even begin to describe how incomplete, how uninspiring, how nothing this book was without spoiling it. Besides, you really don’t want to read it. Trust me on this.

I read Extinction Point because my wife downloaded a free sample on her Kindle, read it, and thought the book might be something we’d enjoy reading together. Boy, was she wrong. That I promised to read the book to completion is the only reason that I didn’t dump it a third of the way through it. Yes, Extinction Point was that bad, bad enough to stand as the single worst post-apocalyptic book I’ve ever read. It offended me on an intellectual level.

The idea, the concept behind the novel, was something that could be worked and developed into something great, but my overall impression is that Extinction Point was not well thought out. The execution and details were major failures.

Before I discuss them, let me give you a brief overview of the book: Emily Baxter is a reporter for New York City daily newspaper. Emily grew up on a farm in Iowa, did not leave the state until she was in her twenties, and yet, never learned how to drive. As the novel opens, she lives in Manhattan on the seventeenth floor of a higher end apartment building. One day, a mysterious red rain falls on Europe and then, hours later, the United States. Within eight hours after the fall of the red rain, seemingly all animal life dies except Emily. A couple of days later, Emily posts her cell phone number on every social media site she can think of. A day or so later, she receives a phone call from a research center in Alaska where a team—supposedly; we never hear from or of anyone other than a man named Jacob—of scientists survived. They suggest Emily come to them.

Much of Extinction Point’s many problems are caused by the author’s use of language. The novel read to me as a collection of words that the author thought might sound pretty together. Sadly, many of his words and phrases failed to make any sense when put into context. “His face turning as white as the blood-splattered sheet of paper he still clutched in his free hand” makes no sense. My absolute favorite:

The line of work Emily was in had long ago taught her to trust her gut instinct. For some unknown, subconscious reason, she hesitated at the threshold of the apartment, the flat of her left hand resting against the door, her right hand clenched so tightly around the ax handle that she could feel her nails digging into the flesh of her palm. Something did not feel right, she realized. She couldn’t put a finger on it, but she had a definite sense of offness about what she was hearing. From the dark apartment beyond the door the wail of the child sounded again, louder now that she was so close, breaking through her indecision.

Wagghhhhh!!!

A scene from the movie The Shining—the one where an insane Jack Nicholson chops down the door to his kid’s room with an ax—leaped unbidden into her mind, sending a shudder of unease down her spine, but she dismissed it as just nerves.

He just loved contradicting himself throughout the book. “She was glad she had brought the flashlight with her, as the interior of the store gradually became darker the farther back she walked. She fished the flashlight out of her backpack switched it on, and twisted the beam adjuster until it gave off a wide angle of light that pushed back the remaining darkness. There was almost enough light to see by without the flashlight…” Another: “Emily didn’t think there would be any kind of threat in the store; Mike was too smart to have stayed. He would have gone home and died with his family just like millions of other Americans probably had.”

Many of the protagonist’s thought processes failed to make any sense. Everyone around Emily is dead, but when she saw a body under a blanket on the sidewalk, she calls out to it and runs up to it with the full expectation that it’s a living person who’s sleeping on the street. Why would she expect this man to be alive? If he was alive, why, considering that everyone else is dead, would he still be sleeping on the street.

That’s but one example of Emily proving to be the dumbest ELE survivor in literary history. There are scores of others. She was worried about drinking tap water after everyone died, but she was comfortable taking a long bubble bath. She was worried about what was going on in the city, but she took a sleeping pill. She stayed in her seventeenth-floor apartment. She holed up in her apartment for days, but did not leave her computer on so she could research as much as she could—Emily was a reporter, remember. She was a reporter who neither reported nor recorded anything that was going on. She didn’t right anything down. She didn’t type anything. She didn’t take a single photograph with her cell phone. Nothing.

The biggest example of Emily’s—and, by extension, the book’s—stupidity is that she thought riding her bicycle from Manhattan to Alaska (heading due north before heading west, too) was a smarter decision than teaching herself how to drive there. My favorite, though, was that after making contact via telephone with a research team in Alaska, Emily rejected the idea of getting out of New York: “What? I’m not planning on leaving my apartment, let alone New York. Why would I need to get out of New York?”

Another one of the things that really bothered me was that Emily’s building had one elevator. It is a high end building with at least twenty floors of apartments and forty units per floor. One elevator? Nah, son. But the story required there to be only one elevator, which the author made undesirable to his heroine, because he needed her to trudge up and down sixteen flights of stairs every time she traveled to and from her apartment.

The dumbest thing about the novel that wasn’t related to Emily’s thought processes was the woman’s last night in her apartment, a day after the power had gone out. One of the creatures chewed threw the floor above Emily’s apartment, fell into her bedroom, and knocked over a lit candle. Emily didn’t notice the fire right away; she only did so when standing by her apartment’s front door. The smoke traveled from the bedroom to the front door, but not into the exposed apartment above her? If it was strong enough to make it to the front of the apartment, would her unit’s fire alarm not have gone off? Fire alarms do have batteries, right? Like I said, the author did not think his story through to completion. After letting the creature out through her front door (yes, she let it out, mainly because she—the author, really—forgot that Emily had a shotgun at her disposal), Emily looks through the peephole into the unlit hallway and saw creatures there. Because this was the world’s most magical peephole, Emily was able to see creatures in the hallway even after backing away from the door. The next day, when she was leaving, she was able to see and avoid falling through holes that had been chewed through the floor. We know she didn’t use the flashlight to see them because we read that she didn’t turn it on until she reached the stairwell. Emily Baxter, our heroine. Maybe she was immune to the red rain because she has built-in SONAR.

I don’t know whether or not the author ever lived in New York or visited the city, but his writing demonstrates very little knowledge of the city. Emily’s boyfriend, Nathan, was a New York City police officer. He was described as tolerant of Emily’s “ability to swear like a proverbial sailor.” You see, “Dating was hard enough in this town; finding someone to put up with her inordinate knowledge of cuss words was even harder.” What New York City is this guy talking about? Speaking of Nathan, a New York City cop would never say “I couldn’t even get within ten miles of the precinct.” First of all, New Yorkers—city dwellers, period—don’t think in terms of miles. Second, and more importantly, Manhattan is only 13 miles long and a couple of miles wide. If the officer was stationed in that borough, then he would have spoken in blocks or given a specific street. If he needed to report to a different borough, then he would have said that he couldn’t get anywhere near it. What good do “miles” do anyone here? Also, what New Yorker thinks of the state? Every New Yorker I know thinks of the city. The state is just…a place. “Is that just here or throughout the state?” is only asked by a New Yorker in fiction.

The geography of the story frustrated me often. Emily’s apartment is described “handy for the Sixty-Sixth Street and Lincoln Center subway station.” Later we read that she leaves her apartment on her bicycle, heads southwest on Amsterdam until she turns left onto Eighty-Sixth. This places her apartment at least twenty blocks north of Lincoln Center Plaza. Umm… When Emily finally decides to leave New York, she planned heading directly North. “If she did that she would be out of the city I a day at most.” How big does he think New York is?

Extinction Point also lacked completeness. There was a beginning—really, it was just the beginning of a beginning—but no middle, and certainly no end. Instead of a novel or the opening of a series, this was more like the opening installment of a serial that would have shown up in the Saturday Evening Post a century ago.

Extinction Point is a novel that lacked continuity. It is a post-apocalyptic tale that lacks desperation. It is a story of science fiction that is less scientific than an episode of Looney Toons. After the red rain falls, Emily decided that people got sick and died due to a virus. She did not think it; she did not hypothesize it. No, Emily knew it. Later in the novel, she decided the red rain was alien. No scientific clues, no evidence, no actual thought behind it. As the entire novel is spent inside of the woman’s head going through every inane thought, I find it reasonable to expect that we would have read Emily’s decision process on the cause of the apocalyptic event if she actually had one. Figuring out the cause is only the single most important plot point this book would have been able to offer.

But Emily never seemed to grasp the gravity of her situation. The further removed I am from finishing the book, I actually grow convinced that the author was more concerned with showing how talented a wordsmith he can be than he was with staying true to the story. How else to explain the inclusion of the following prose as Emily leaves her apartment for the last time:

Leaving it behind was going to be painful not only because of her deep emotional investment but because, when she stepped outside that door for the final time, she was also stepping away from the last remnants of her old life and all the security that came with it.

Emily Baxter, a shotgun in one hand and all that was left of her worldly possessions strapped to her back, opened the door to her apartment, stepped outside, and closed the door on her old life as she began a new journey out into the unkown.

What? Everyone she’s ever known has been dead nearly a week, her adopted hometown has been taken over by what she believes are aliens, and the author treats it as if she’s leaving home for a job in the big city.

Despite everything I’ve written so far, Extinction Point’s biggest failing is its absurdity. Actually, its biggest failing is the writing itself. There were some funny moments and some good turns of phrase. They were, unfortunately, few, far between, and lacked any cohesiveness. I really don’t know what the author was thinking. I do know he was in love with his words. “It was like watching some strange migration.” No, it was not like watching some strange migration. It was watching a strange migration. “She knew, with a concrete certainty that sank deep to the bottom of her stomach, the world would remember this day, and those that followed it, for as long as there was still a human race.” Gee, you think?

Whenever he tried to put together a poignant or emphatic moment, it fell flat. Usually, it was because he couldn’t leave a sentence alone and, instead, had to stamp it with Emily’s feeling about it. Emily is an idiot, so this never helps. “This sickness, this red plague, did not seem to discriminate between species, and Emily was pretty sure that was a very bad thing.” Also, “Now that she had seen what had crawled out of one of those cocoons with her own eyes, there was little doubt left that what she had witnessed over the past few days was connected, part of some unfathomable plan.”

Oh, Emily. How stupid can a protagonist be? When it comes to her and her trip, the answer is immensely. Many reviews about Extinction Point go on and on about how stupid it was that Emily decided to ride instead of drive to Alaska, but that decision was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to dumb decisions. Emily packed a tiny apartment onto her bike. Multiple wool sweaters, multiple parkas, multiple pairs of shoes, multiple gallons of water, multiple pairs of socks, multiple T-shirts, multiple multiples of multiples, as if she wouldn’t come across a store or home during the 4,400+ mile trip to Alaska. In total, it had to be a couple hundred pounds of stuff.

The final 20% of Extinction Point must be treated as an entity unto itself. Even though I had considered the first 80% to be the dumbest book I’d ever read, I now refer to that final fifth as “the dumb part”. It was…special. Emily brought an entire Wal-Mart with her on her bike, but she didn’t think to bring a map or a pair of sunglasses. Of course, that means she had trouble with morning sun and she got lost. Yes, she did have a GPS with her, but she had an “innate stubbornness to refuse to rely on technology unless she absolutely had to. The GPS and sat-phone were not going to work forever, so the sooner she learned to get by without them the quicker she would become self-sufficient.” Where I come from, using the tools that are available to you is the definition of self-sufficiency. Why did she even bring the GPS?

The most ridiculous thing Emily failed to bring with her was a tent. You’re probably thinking that she could just sleep in people’s houses, in their beds. Emily, darling little saint that she is, has a moral objection to doing that. Even though she’s the last known survivor of the lower forty-eight, Emily has a moral objection to sleeping in others’ beds. She’ll break into houses and scavenge for food, but she can’t sleep in a bed. I know, I know; I don’t get it either.

The most important thing she forgot to bring with her was a contingency plan. Jones’ text explicitly states so.

After a fire forces Emily into a panicked detour, she comes across a “forest unlike any that had ever existed on Earth before,” a forest of alien trees. After a week of cowering and refusing to act like the only reporter on the ground in the face of the story of all-time, she decides to stop riding her bike and stick her hands into the alien goo. Instead of trying to ride her bike around the forest or find another way, Emily decided that the safest and smartest way to run away from the aliens was to WALK HER BICYCLE THROUGH THE ALIEN FOREST. She was already nursing a pretty bad shoulder injury. I will never understand how this was a healthier or safer option than riding her bike around the forest. Of course she was attacked by monsters and of course she forgot she had the shotgun and of course she was rescued BY THE LAST LIVING DOG ON EARTH, a dog from Valhalla, New York named—yes, you guessed it—Thor. Prior to that climactic scene, the creatures had shown exactly zero interest in Emily. What’s one more contradiction?

A reader is left with no conclusion but to believe that the only reason for the fire, the fire, and the monsters was to have Thor save Emily. Why didn’t the author just give Emily a dog at the beginning of the book? Did he not realize that many apartments in New York City are pet-friendly.

I joked with my wife that the author was not use UPS—he can’t make logistics work for him. (Thank you! Thank you! I’ll be here all week.) Extinction Point was a logistical nightmare. Practicality, geography, science, societal understanding, and common sense are but a sample of the ideals that never made an appearance in a novel whose protagonist, who also served as the only POV character—and, for a good 80% of the novel, its only character at all—is a veteran newspaper reporter. Some stories are plot driven. Some are character driven. Extinction Point is deus ex machina driven. There is no reason, no logic, behind the action. I can only go through so much of it here, but nearly every page contained something frustrating enough to make me laugh.

F

Point and Shoot

Point and Shoot by Duane Swierczynski

After the greatness that was Hell and Gone, I expected the final installment of the Charlie Hardie trilogy to be at least a bit of a letdown. While the novel did live up to that expectation, it was still pretty good. It was just what we’ve come to expect from both Charlie Hardie and author Duane Swierczynski. It was full of death, destruction, and mayhem. And though the particulars of the ending were not surprising, the details of how we got there were.

Only two negatives about the book for me. Unfortunately, they were both rather big. First, I felt denied a proper resolution for Mann. I’m sure plenty of other readers disagree, but I felt cheated. That left a bitter taste in my mouth. Huge disappointment.

The other negative was the large amount of recaps. I know and expect that series contain brief expositions of what happened in previous books. I don’t always like it, but it’s fine. Point and Shoot had a lot of them, and they were not brief. Usually, the recaps are sprinkled near the beginnings of books. Not this time. It felt to me as if they grew more frequent the further along the book went. It threw off the rhythm of my reading and took me out of the story on a few occasions.

So while the story was fine, I was left a little displeased. All in all, it was an OK, but not really satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

C+

We the Animals

We the Animals by Justin Torres

We the Animals is a novel that was written to make the reader emote. It did not work on me. I did not feel this novel at all. It was simplistic. It was full of cliché and stereotype. It was, in a word, boring. Yes, there was flowery language and imagery that put me into Upstate New York with this mixed-race family. But it was for naught. I did not find that narrator’s tale interesting. Instead, I wondered why the author chose the youngest of the three boys as his narrator. The reason for that, too, turned out to be cliché.

I was very disappointed in this book, especially since it was written by a person of color. Some of the descriptions of the Puerto Rican father and biracial boys were disturbing, especially compared to those of the White mother. They fed into the stereotypes the author used throughout the novel that undermined the struggle and search for identity this novel was supposed, I believe, to showcase. Man, what a disappointment.

C-