Customer Reviews

Achilles Heel

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Faber & Faber has a reputation for quality crime fiction so I had no second thoughts about buying the book.

The fight against child porn looked like a subject that is very likely to spark emotion and make a reader follow the good guy(s) through the book till the final showdown enthusiastically. Even the abundance of protocols and other official-looking insertions did not discourage me - I was hoping the collage-like text would have a true ring of semi-documentary narrative.

Maybe I was expecting too much but the sense of disappointment is very definite.
The main character, the chief investigation officer Alan Rosslyn is a person who is supposed to lend a reader his shoes for treading the book's murky landscapes. The guy sleeps with half of the women mentioned in a thriller but the nature of his irresistible appeal is a mystery - Mr. Rosslyn is a boring, brooding type, not your average easygoing womanizer. Still he gets all the ladies he wants - and more. Not a very believable - or likable - creation, very bleak and pale despite - or because - all the author's halfhearted efforts to make him come through as flesh'n'blood man with a mission in his life.

His nemesis is a cartoonish psycho with a penchant for carving and slicing live flesh with quality cutlery, the maniac on the prowl in the dozens of titles in this genre making a guest appearance in the Achilles Heel.

The set for their final duel is ridiculously elaborate so you'll expect something kitschy but hugely entertaining.

Don't do that mistake. Everything ends in a haste, with laconic and barely sufficient choreography. It seems the author was putting some extras - like the lengthy formal accounts of police procedures - to make sure the text will finally reach the desired 2-3 hundred pages, will amount to a book. But seeing the goal achieved the writer had somehow become bored with his project and wrapped it up in a tired haste.

Could not help flinching at some of Reg Gadney's ridiculous inventions like PPP - the Paedophile Pornographic Pallor, that takes hold of the investigator's visage every time he had to watch that filth like a kind of toxic patina. I was wondering if the PPP changes to the BPP every time he stumbles upon some bestiality scenes and what are the chief visual differences between the PPP and the BPP.

Achilles Heel is a thriller that fails to entertain, it offers a reader the main character he/she won't be too happy to inhibit for the ride through the book, the author puts in some non-essential extras and some of the accounts are repeated with no reason beside the demonstration of Mr. Gadney's inferior skills of composition.
Maybe it was a time for Reg Gadney to write a book to continue his cooperation with Faber & Faber, a deadline that regretfully caught the author in his much less than top creative mode, but I can't see any reason for you not to skip that publication if you still want to consider F&F as a distinguished publisher of quality crime fiction.