It's a New Year! I hope you've been reading lots of books over the holidays and have many mini reviews to share. As usual, you can email them to booksandbacon (at) yahoo dot com and I'll post them, or you can add them in the comments.
My mini-review is more of a mini-rant. I read a romantic suspense last week, and it suffered from a problem I notice a lot in mystery and romantic suspense-- the wild assumption. There was a murder 20 years ago, so of course when a house that's stood empty since the murder is broken into it must be related. The wild leap is supported by no facts, but everyone goes along with it like it's written in stone. And then it turns out that it really is related. That's just sloppy. I understand that there's no place for the random and unrelated in a story. The reader should suspect that something that happens in the story's today is related to past events. But the characters aren't aware that they're in a story. For them to connect two events with no logical reason to do so except to move the story forward is bad writing. Give us something more, some clue that allows the characters to reasonably make the connection. Or let them make assumptions that lead to red herrings. But don't let them make unquestioned assumptions that turn out to be right.
Oh! I have a miniRant.
ReplyDeleteUntil recently I'd never read a Meg Cabpt I didn't love. Then I added Lady of Skye to my nook. It was about a London aristocrat who takes the job of village physician on Skye, an island in the Hebrides much to the dismay of the former doctor's daughter who has been treating patients in his absence. It sounded great. It wasn't. It's repetitious and only occasionally amusing and the mystery was so obvious that even I (the chick who thought the Lace Reader's ending was a shocker) saw it coming many chapters before it was revealed. Ugh.
I know I read that one, but I don't remember much about it one way or another. Another of her books, Educating Caroline, is one of my favorites, though. I definitely recommend that one, if you haven't read it yet.
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