Tag Archives: book reviews

Where Angels Fear – book review

Thanks to NetGalley and bookouture for the advance ebook copy for review.

According to the tag, this is book five in a series featuring “Detectives Kane and Alton”. I’ve not read the previous four, but I’ll have a comment on this in a bit.

There’s a serial killer on the loose, picking off targets on a stretch of road with little to no cellphone coverage, and not enough traffic for witnesses to be a factor. As the book opens, the prologue has two young women stopping to see if someone whose car has its flashers on needs an assist, as a blizzard is moving in. But the “stranded” motorist isn’t as stranded as they appear, and attacks the girls. The driver gets a whack with an axe, and the other girl flees into the snow, spending the night out in the freezing cold.When the morning comes, she finds that her friend the driver has vanished.

The book then pops over to Sheriff Jenna Alton suffering from a cold or virus, and Deputy Kane in the same house, caring for her. It is not clear what their relationship is just from that series of scenes; I suppose this is something explained in the books previous to this. This is the point where the first couple of problems I have come in.

First, the tagline calls Kane and Alton “detectives” but their titles are Deputy and Sheriff, respectively. This may seem like a minor point, but I selected this based on them actually being detectives, not people with other titles who happen to investigate crimes detectives would ordinarily look into.these things. The second (again, probably only an issue to me), Alton is higher ranking than Kane, so why is her name not first in the tagline?

On we go into the story, where the next problem crops up: the info dump. Kane is injured and walks with a cane, and w get about a half page of telling us what happened to him. A little further in, we have had about a dozen people introduced since the prologue. Too many!

The story moves on in a rather straightforward and at times tedious manner. There’s a tidbit that pops up that also strains credulity: the Sheriff was apparently an agent who helped bring down a cartel, along with Kane, and was basically sent into witsec. An undercover agent given a job of being a Sheriff, a high-profile job, regardless of how small the area is?

As the story goes along, the bad guy makes an appearance, doing fairly nasty but also a little too work-requiring: does the guy not have an actual job?

I had a lot of trouble getting through this. The characters, while interesting, were not terrible deep. There was also an absolutely annoying habit the author had during the dialogue sections: the characters were always doing something and talking. Nobody ever just said “said” or “replied” or “asked”. They smiled or shrugged or raised an eyebrow or glanced or gaped or rubbed their chin or grimaced or stood or waved their hand or did (something) in consternation, like frowned or knitted their brows, or lifted their chin as an example. In one paragraph, the main character shook her head, sighed, shrugged, and glanced. They can just say something to say it without an associated action. It really took me out of the reading.

We then have another abduction (actually two) and get scenes of what the bad guy is doing to the people he’s taken, and why he’s taking them.Things pick up from here as the chase is on, but then one of the deputies does something that would be very silly, given that we now know the guy he’s talking to has to be a suspect in the kidnappings and murders. The fight scene between the deputy (Rawley) and the bad guy is, I think, the best part of the book.

Overall, the plot is okay, and holds itself together well enough, and the readability is fine, too, if you can get past all the things people do while they’re talking, instead of just talking, and the number of characters dumped in at once at the beginning. However, this did not keep me interested enough to go back and read the previous entries in this series.

Two stars out of five.

A Matter of Will – book review

Thanks to NetGalley and Thomas&Mercer for the electronic advance copy. This book is slated for release this summer.

Before I go in, a side note: this is an uncorrected proof. I’m not sure if whoever edits these titles reads the feedback, but please, for the love of anything you hold holy, correct the instances of “shelf company” to “shell company”. I’ve never read anything else by this author, so have no comparisons to earlier works of his.

Will Matthews is a not-so-successful broker (or “wealth manager”) at a finance company – so unsuccessful that he gets dumped on by his boss on an almost daily basis and worries he will be fired at any moment. Enter Sam and Eve, who he meets at a hockey game. Before he knows what has hit him, Sam is sweeping Will off his feet, taking him to lavish dinners, tuxedo-required parties, and parking tens of millions of dollars with him for investing. He basically buys Will a ten million dollar apartment, and makes him sign off as a director of or participant in various shell companies.

Meanwhile, Gwen is a young attorney added to the team defending a Hollywood star, who has allegedly killed his wife. Will and Gwen meet up via a dating app, have a dinner, and another date. They wind up as a couple – it’s true love for both of them.

There’s no real way to go through the rest without spoilers, so I’ll leave it at: everything is not as it seems, and soon after that, Will and Gwen have to start thinking about their very survival, both professionally and personally.

The good: it’s easy enough to read. The author doesn’t wander off into incomprehensible jargon associated with his own profession (law) when some courtroom/lawyer scenes come up. Will is given a fairly good backstory. There’s some infodumping, given as dialogue instead of a wall of text.

The bad: I’m sorry to say I found it to be a weird mashup of The Firm and Wall Street and When Harry Met Sally. Will is so naive as to be implausible, and apparently it doesn’t sound any alarms to him that some random guy he meets wants to invest a fortune with him. .Even worse, the first 50% of the book is very dull throughout this. Not once does Will question anything, and the first half is just Will and Gwen going about their respective businesses.. It looks like the author couldn’t decide on what kind of book it should be, so included everything, and that swamped the entire book. Also: using the actual John Yoo in this? Not good.

The remainder of the book involves some murders, a bit of cat and mouse, and asks the reader to believe that the kingpin of a gigantic criminal organization would tell even the new nominal leader of it about plans, the evidence being held over their head, or allow that person to remain alive, knowing that person is not all in and is hesitant about roping in another young broker, among other things. We then get swept over once more to the legal bit playing out on Gwen’s side, which does nothing for the story. She, too, winds up appearing to be a tad too naive, and the ending is simply far too convenient, wrapping up all the details.

If this book were by an as yet unpublished author, and they submitted it as it is, that author would remain unpublished. It would be fine as a plane or beach read, but I would not recommend it.