Number 32 - State of Terror - Hillary Clinton & Louise Penny

 

This review will contain some spoilers.

I'll start with the positives.  It was a fast read. The story has the potential to be interesting. I also found a really interesting bookmark in it left by the previous owner.

That's that bit over and done with.

The back cover proclaims this to be the most authentic political thriller I'll ever read. I'm sorry but if Dr Seuss wrote one it would feel more genuine than this. The last Carl Hiaasen felt a lot more realistic than this - and it was well written - which gives it a huge advantage over this farrago of a novel.

This is by far the worst written book I've read in years.  The prose can charitably be described as clunky. if I wasn't feeling charitable, I'd go for frenetic, irritating and just plain bad.

The writers seem to think that action sequences are best done with ever shorter sequences featuring different characters finishing by cutting away from what the final character sees without telling the reader what that was.  

At some point in the next chapter, one of the other characters will talk about what happened. 

The lead character Ellen is the newly appointed secretary of State for the USA, appointed despite being a huge political rival to the newly incumbent president. We might as well call her Mary Sue as she is the most obvious self insert by Mrs Clinton. She's almost impossibly astute, fluent in a dozen languages, and utterly flawless in personality.  Despite her perfection and intelligence though, she fails to recognise the villain of the piece when he's stood right next to her and talking to her, even though she once spent two years making a documentary about him...

That's just one plot hole out of many in this badly edited, badly written attempt at literature. When I say badly edited, you can't give a better example than when we get this direct quote from the book  (Pages 360 &361 in my copy)

"The second wave took off, the helicopters filled with precious cargo. The sons and daughters of parents who would be terrified to know what their country was asking of their children. The young men and women clutched M-14 rifles and stared across the aisle at each other.

The young men and women clutched M-14 rifles and stared across the aisle at each other."

Apart from the repetition of an entire sentence, this section shows just one of the thousands of sentence fragments to be found in the book.

Constant use of incomplete sentences for no reason.

Sentences without verbs. Scattered all through the book.  At least 5 to a page. In action sequences, probably twenty per page. And no payout at the end of it. Because of cutaways. 

It becomes very wearing, very quickly. There are several deaths in the book. But all off screen with a cutaway immediately before it happens.

If it was better written I could forgive some of the flaws. If it hadn't promised "the most authentic - and gripping - political thriller I've ever read" on the back cover, I might be willing to accept the scene where she blackmails the Russian leader by photoshopping him into child porn and threatening to release it to the world unless he tells her where the bad guy is hiding, or where she follows the US version of the SAS on a raid into the villain's house, or where she seems to be able to travel halfway around the world in a couple of hours, or any of the other places where it's slightly less realistic than the Tiger who Came to Tea.

But it isn't. 

This is a dreadful book on nearly every level. It's the closest I've come in a long time to not finishing.  The only reason I did was because it's this month's book group read. I forced myself to finish it, and I'm sorry that I did.

The last two pages are the most cliched pile of nonsense in the book.  It's all over, the threats gone... Or is it? Mwa ha ha ha ha.

Don't waste your time with this book. My copy will be going to mulch down somewhere for compost.  I don't see any justification for inflicting this on anyone else. I have no one I hate that much.

Number 102 - I am the Tiger - John Ajvide Lindqvist

 

This is part three of a triptych of books by John Lindqvist.  I'm not sure I'd call it a trilogy as such.  The first two books (I Am Behind You, and I Always find You) are only linked tangentially and whilst this book does tie them together much more tightly, the links between the previous too books are still too tenuous.

The first book was set on a caravan park where a number of vans suddenly found themselves in a strange landscape with an unending green field and a sunless sky.  

Book 2 was set in the real world and followed a young John Limdqvist as he moved to the city for the first time, trying to make his living as a magician and found himself embroiled in a supernatural cult, a strange alien slime that transports people to a heavenly new world,  and a plot to kill a prominent Swedish politician - a real event from Swedish history (the Swedish equivalent of JFK - to this day no one knows the true identity of the killer)

This book follows a washed up crime reporter who starts investigating a new crime lord on the block the mysterious X who is smuggling in huge amounts of the purest cocaine whilst simultaneously persuading existing crime lords to commit suicide.  We also follow his nephew, a teenager who's been selling his ADHD medicine since he was 13 and who is offered the chance to get in on the ground floor selling ridiculously cheap and pure cocaine...

For the first 150 pages or so, this reads like a crime thriller, with very few hints of the supernatural (other than subtle hints as to the cause of the spate of suicides). Even when the supernatural becomes evident, the focus is still very much on the human cost of the crime in progress and the dual viewpoints on the cocaine ring, the rising star in the organisation and his uncle investigating.

The story rattles along at a cracking pace for the most part.  There is one sub-plot regarding Tommy's living arrangements that slows things down in the middle section, but not enough to be a real issue. There are also hints about Tommy's dog being in some way special that never amount to anything. Thinking about it now, it's a little bit irritating how much time he spent on a plot thread as strange as that that went nowhere.

Like Gary McMahon's excellent Concrete Grove, this book builds up a convincing picture of a run down estate and a local boss who is much more than he seems.  There are probably more thematic similarities to Concrete Grove in this book than there are to the first two parts of his own trilogy. However this book isn't quite as scary or freaky as Concrete Grove.  It's far more grounded in reality and doesn't play the supernatural up as much as it could have done. 

The ending was unexpected to say the least, despite the fact that, in hindsight, the clues have all been laid out clearly.  Lindqvist certainly earns a few extra points for that. 

You need to read the first two books to appreciate this one properly.  Some detail could be confusing otherwise. It ties the previous two books in fairly cleverly, but I may need to reread the series again to see how accurate the links are. I'm not sure if the link to book 1 is forced or if my memory is faulty. I won't mind, they're all really good books, at least as good as an average Stephen King. 

There are Easter eggs for his other novels too. Little Star is referenced at one point for definite and some of the background events seem familiar too.

Overall, this is a damned good read, but not perfect.  It could have lost a subplot or two on the way and possibly been that much tighter a narrative but it's never less than very readable indeed and some of the set pieces are genuinely frightening. When he does play up the supernatural, the novel takes off and I think I maybe wanted more of that than Tommy's domestic life. It still kept me enthralled all the way through and delivered some great shocks.  It's done what it's supposed to and then some.

Number 7 - A Simple Plan - Scott Smith

Up until sometime about two years ago, I had no idea that the Sam Raimi film A Simple Plan was based on a book.  I loved that film, I think it's the best film Raimi has made.  Better than his Evil Dead or his Spiderman films.  Then I saw this book in the charity book section in a local branch of Tesco.

For only 50p, it was well worth the effort of picking it up.

The question is, is this a rare case of the film being better than the book, or, as more normally happens, the book is better than the film?

If I say that halfway through this I went online to order his other book, The Ruins, that would be a good sign that I liked this.

It is indeed better than the film it spawned.  Knowing the storyline wasn't an issue as the film makes several changes to the narrative.  I suppose those changes worked for the film and kept the character of Hank more sympathetic.  In a book, you can give the thought proceses that lead to a bad decision.  In a film its a good deal more difficult so I understand why, plus Raimi's changes gave us a heroic action sequence near the end, which is entirely absent from the book - replaced with Hank sinking to his lowest point.

The story follows two brothers, Hank amd Jacob, and Jacob's friend Lou.  They're driving in the snow when they swerve to avoid a fox and crash into a verge.  Jacob's dog jumps out of the pickup truck and chases the fox.  When they go after the dog they find a small plane crashed in the woods.  On board the plane is a duffel bag containing 4.4 million dollars. 

The simple plan of the title is that they will keep hold of the money till springtime, when the plane will certainly be discovered, see if anyone is chasing the money, if not, they'll split it and leave town, if they are, and there's going to be trouble, Hank will burn it so no one ever knows they had it..

Of course the plan doesn't quite go to plan.

The way things spiral completely out of control is brilliantly done.  Every action taken follows on logically from the next. Bad decisions on the spur of the moment lead to violence and recrimination. To say any more would be spoilerific in the extreme.

Hank is a great narrator.  His supporting cast are excellently drawn.  I loved the way that the initial characterisation of Jacob came from the description of his truck.  A description that told us almost as much about Hank as it did Jacob.

The tension ratchets up throughout the book, and in the closing chapters particularly I found myself almost forgetting to breathe with the depths to which Hank found himself sinking. 

Brilliant book.  easy 9/10.  I will be reading more by this writer.