Customer Reviews

The Bite (Luther Ewing Thriller)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is an embarassment; the kind of thing an adolescent would write if he knew all the words. It is rife with minor technical errors that really spoil the flow and much of the slang is years out of date and completely wrong for the age of the main character. The characters are comic book sterotypes - the hero is a big macho guy, a cop who is a rebel against the system and who was a special forces soldier and speaks fluent Russian and who has a young hot, randy girlfriend - ugh!! The plot, while plausible I guess, is nothing special.

Give me a break. I quit reading at page 151 and went on to read something by a better author.

Michael Crow writes a good novel. It is tight. It is seamless. It has a riveting plot. You care about the characters. It is also violent. As one reader pointed out, the "f" word makes a frequent appearance. Actually, with Amazon's new condordance system, close to 300 appearances in either the noun, adjective, adverb or the gerund form. Retribution is also drawn out and quite medieval. I don't recall reading the ending Crow proposes ever before and I have to say it ranks with the boiling of the dutch sailor in "Shogun."

The point of all of this is it ain't "The Mermaid Chair" or "Tuesday's with Morrie." It's rough and it's tough and it relies heavily on street slang. If Shane, riding off into the West while Brandon DeWilde cries for him, could tell the audience why he must be alone, trust me, he would be using the same lanquage Luther Ewing uses. So if you know this and it offends you . . . get my meaning?

Luther inserts himself into the chasing of the meth lab makers, sellers and killers, where he is joined by Francisca Russo, a DEA agent who seems to have a double or even triple hidden agenda.

One of the best new violent crime centerpieces along with John Rain (Barry Eisler) and Frank Corso (G. M. Ford). 5 stars. Larry Scantlebury

THE BITE starts violently, ends violently, and has lots of violence in between. It's a cold, tough-talking book, with the f-word the first choice for all parts of speech. It's so talky, in fact, that it's hard to consider it a real thriller-more a mystery with a high body count. I was drawn to read THE BITE because of its setting, the suburban Towson-Cockeysville area north of Baltimore with which I thought I was familiar. But I didn't find much that was recognizable, or compelling. The book flap identifies "Michael Crow" as a pseudonym for "a prize-winning, critically acclaimed literary novelist whose works have been translated and published in nine languages." Maybe he was too embarrassed to use his real name for this one.