Take a journey into the dark and dangerous world of Sunday Times bestseller Lee Weeks - if you dare! It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime. But it became a journey into hell! Paradise has become a nightmare. Five young voluntary workers on a once in a lifetime gap year in Thailand have vanished into thin air. Entire villages lay ransacked, their people brutally murdered. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, troubled detective Johnny Mann is haunted by personal demons, including the unsolved murder of his father. Trying to pick up the pieces of his life, he receives a desperate plea for help from a woman in Amsterdam - a woman who claims to have known his father intimately years before. Hoping to unravel to mystery shrouding his father's death, Mann agrees to go undercover and search for the five missing teenagers, one of whom is the woman's 18-year-old son, Jake. And Mann's secret brother! From the carefree beaches of Thailand to the labyrinthine streets of Amsterdam, nothing is as at seems as Mann is plunged into conspiracy and peril and pitted against pure evil.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"A gritty and atmospheric read." Closer magazine
About the Author
Lee Weeks was born in Devon. She left school at seventeen and, armed with a notebook and very little cash, spent seven years working her way around Europe and South East Asia. She returned to settle in London, marry and raise two children. She has worked as an English teacher and personal fitness trainer. Her books have been Sunday Times bestsellers . She now lives in Devon. Follow the investigations of Johnny Mann on Twitter at DIJohnnyMann
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Disjointed and depressing,
This review is from: Death Trip (Paperback)
This is the second Lee Weeks book I've read (the first was The Trophy Taker) and to be fair, if I'd remembered the name of the author of the other one before I bought this book, I never would have.
Within the first chapter I realised that this book was by the same person but was determined to give it a go, after all The Trophy Taker was her first book and maybe she'd improved since. No such luck (feel free to skip to the last paragraph for a synopsis of my review if you don't want to read it all - there as some spoilers)! The actual story line, as with her first book, is very interesting and promising. In this case a group of Dutch students/ volunteers are taken hostage in Thailand. It starts getting convoluted at this point, when a member of the Hong Kong police (Lee's repeat hero, Johnny Mann, half Chinese half English, of which we're reminded often) is brought into the fray after discovering one of the volunteers is his half-brother, from his father's secret long term affair with a Dutch prostitute. But wait there's more; Johnny finds out his other previously unknown half-brother (older brother of the abductee, also a result of the clandestine affair) died the previous year in a Tsunami, also in Thailand, after escaping once, then returning to save a young girl. Then Johnny's sidekick 'Shrimp' soon finds out that the Thai government (and NAP, the same charity who organised the volunteer workers who were abducted) have stolen all the charity money given by the Dutch and other relief efforts towards rebuilding the coastline after the tsunami. The Dutch fundraising effort was largely organised by the ex-prostitute mother above-mentioned, who by the way is also dying, with only weeks to live. Sounds like too much going on? It is. And I've left out the Dutch prostitute's partner, a cop, who runs around Amsterdam like Magnum PI minus the Ferrari, breaking into homes including that of the crazy drug addicted, sex and hostage selling dominatrix (born in Thailand and adopted out after her village was destroyed) who runs NAP. Then there's the crazy sex hungry group of abductors like 'Handsome' and 'Toad' and the heroic escape efforts of Jake (Johnny's half-brother) who seems to take after his brothers with his manly heroic, leader of the pack ways, and the softer side of the story (or trying to be), Johnny's reminiscing about his dad who was murdered by Triads and his newly found 'family' who he's determined to save as he's never been able to say the word 'brother' before. ARGH!!! This information is all forced on you at lightning speed within the first 43 chapters of the book in a boring, disjointed and factually written way; with each chapter focussing on a different part of the story. Now, I'll point out this book has 125 chapters and each is no more than 2-3 pages long, so I'm only a third of the way in at this point. This means that every 2-3 pages, you're jumping to a whole different story line, then back, then back again. Confusion and frustration abounds. The characters in no way engage you - they are flat (despite all the author's efforts at making Johnny come to life with repeated references to his half Chinese half English background his poor murdered girlfriend an dad etc etc.). The only vaguely interesting character is Shrimp, who at times is mildly entertaining, emphasis on mildly. There are no really happy endings in her books and other than a couple of moments with Shrimp, there are no lighter moments at all; the book seems to start on a low, and spiral even lower in its depressiveness. Suddenly I realise 43 chapters in, I feel like Marvin the Paranoid Android ("I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed"). I actually find myself wondering what goes on in this author's mind to create such a mind-numbing piece of violence and oppression as a work of fiction. Even the hero is hardly heroic. I've read other reviews which call this book fast paced and hard to put down. I suspect that in these cases some Speed was smuggled in with the book shipment and that during manufacture, some binding glue was accidentally left on cover, causing stickyness. Fortunately there are no such problems with my copy. I read on average 2-3 books a fortnight (sometimes less, sometimes a lot more), have done since I was 13 and in those 19 years I have found only 4 books which I've had trouble reaching the end of, and here they are in order of most difficult to force myself to read: 1) Nikolai Tolstoy's The Quest for Merlin 2) Edward Rutherford's Dublin (though I love all his others) 3) Lee Week's Death Trip 4) Lee Week's The Trophy Taker This is not to say that I enjoy everything I read, simply that I usually don't have a problem finishing a book, even if I don't like it. Take James Patterson's Alex Cross's Trial for example. Hated almost every page, finished it in a day though and didn't come out depressed as Marvin. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that while the story line is interesting, the author fails to deliver the engaging characters, tension and suspense that makes this sort of book successful. It's too choppy and crowded with information which creates confusion rather than intrigue as is intended. In the hands of another author, the story line would most likely have captured me, but I'm afraid this is the last Lee Week's book I'll be making the effort to read.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
