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Where
to start? the climax of the
book, a mass gathering of all
the main characters, is handled
sloppily with little character
development or interaction.
The threads of the story are
hastily and shabbily gathered
together and tied up in a kind
of loose granny knot.
There are so many loose ends
tied up so quickly and simply
that it leaves the reader
feeling cheated that they have
to read through 450 odd pages to
find out what could have been
told in a paragraph.
The
characterisation is poor and
demonstrates the author’s loss
of contact with the real world.
The character Lucy continues to
be murky. Murky in her
motivations, murky in the way
her over whelming levels of
skills and abilities are
alternately overplayed or
completely disregarded by the
author. There is a point
where she completely acts
outside the scope of her moral
code to little effect to her
psychological make-up.
Murky murky murky. Lucy has
become a mere comic book super
hero with about as much
credibility.
The re-entry of a character from
the past is not even handled
well. I won’t spoil the
surprise for what it’s worth,
but it is delivered in such a
way as to just down play what
value it might have had.
It would appear from the climax
that this character was
resurrected purely to provide
some sort of omnipotent device
with which to tie up all of the
threads of the story.
The
suspense of the story never
really builds, as a
psychological thriller it does
not succeed very well.
There are convergent story lines
and they do gather some impetus
at a point in the story but as
stated before the climax is such
a whimper that it is all for
nought. The writing in the past
has had a heavy dose of first
person observation of the life
and time of the main character
Scarpetta. There was very
little time spent in this book
to the thoughts and feelings of
Scarpetta. The main
character of the series has
become a mere passenger, with
little attention paid to her
activities.
In
a nutshell, this story seems to
have been written by an author
that is the victim of “the
Emperor’s New Clothes”
syndrome. So insulated
from the real world and
surrounded by staff and people
from the publishing house that
they have no balanced feedback
in how their stories read.
To be fair the book starts off
promisingly, but fails to
deliver. The ending is
rushed and very poor, like a
movie director that has run out
of money or an author who lacks
motivation and a real worldview
who needs to crank out another
book. As a stand-alone
book the writing is poor and
I would not recommend it.
For fans of Scarpetta, it
continues the unsatisfying move
away from crime fiction and uses
crime as an excuse for romantic
pap except that even as a
romance novel it doesn’t
really succeed.
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