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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Matter of Life and Death, December 22, 2009
This review is from: Double Exposure (Paperback)
That's what this book by Michael Lister is: A matter dealing with life and death. A nature photographer accidentally captures a murder on his camera and spends the night running for his life from the killer-- or killers. Throughout the night, a battle between the body and mind play out as thoughts, images and memories appear that remind him of those in his life that he loved, those who passed away and those who wait for him. Life becomes something more than mere existence, yet he must exist through the night while being hunted.
I met Michael Lister at a writer's conference and he is a man who knows his stuff. This is the first novel of his that I have read and I disagree with the Publisher's Weekly blurb at the top of this page; DOUBLE EXPOSURE has won him a new fan. I highly recommend this literary thriller!
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Dud, November 8, 2011
Double Exposure didn't grab me by 18%-- in fact, it repelled me, and it was hard work getting that far. Problem 1. The writing. Short snatches. Usually. Except when the author gets a thought that requires not just a few words, but rather a long squirt in a sentence structure that takes quite awhile to parse. In case you think I'm exaggerating, here's one of the author's constructs: "It wasn't until his father died and he had to rush home to run the small-town gun and pawn and care for his mother, that he picked up a camera again--a dust-covered, ancient, fully-automatic Nikon hocked years earlier, languishing on the shelf as power tools and small appliances had come and gone." -Kindle Locations 81-83 Problem 2. The photographic technique. The author spends a large fraction of the text describing Remington's approach to wildlife photography. Based on my photographic experience, the author describes a lot of serious mistakes that no decent wildlife photographer would make. Such as leaving the camera in his backpack until the picture he envisions shows up. Or getting motion-blurred pictures using a pair of strobe lights. "Day. Leaping, turning, darting deer break the infrared beam, leaving blurs of buckskin behind. Too fast." -Kindle Location 551 Problem 3. The plot. Several disjointed tidbits so far. Screams in the woods? Father died. Marriage trouble. Old man with gun. Black bear with cub. Moaning about dwindling habitat. Not many things of recognizable significance, considering the number of words used up to this point. Not enough to encourage me to plow onward. Give it a try, if you want. It didn't do much for me.
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Expose Yourself to this Thriller!, September 14, 2009
Remington James is a successful but unhappy advertising executive when his father dies. He returns to his hometown to run his father's store and care for his mother who is dying of MS. While he is home, he decides to pick up the hobby, the passion, he gave up years ago, wildlife photography. He has set trap cameras in the woods of the Apalachicola River Basin in hopes of maybe catching the elusive Florida panther. As he is out taking pictures and checking his traps one evening, he discovers that he has caught not the panther on his camera, but a murder. And now the murderers are hunting Remington through the pitch black of the Florida woods.
If readers want to read DOUBLE EXPOSURE surfacely and minimally, they are in for a heart-pounding thriller. Lister's written a tight plot that doesn't allow one to slow down for even a second, just like his protagonist.
Lister created a powerful effect by being a minimalist in this novel. His protagonist is a photographer out taking pictures in the woods. Lister's prose mimics that process so you can hear the camera shutter click as you read:
Evening. Glow.
Dark figures.
Shot.
Explosion.
Bloom of blood.
Body dropping to the cold ground.
Death. Digging.
Fire.
And Lister's setting development carries you smack into the middle of Remington's Eden that is horrifically transformed into his Hell all in the course of one night. Remington reminds himself to "Use your senses. All of them." And Lister helps the readers to use their senses, all of them. Whether they are seeing the beauty of the landscape or the nightmare of a murder. Whether they are hearing life, or feeling fear. Readers will definitely be in the woods with Remington James on the most terrifying night of his life. But they'll have to listen carefully to hear nature's sounds over the thumping of their own hearts.
If you want to delve deeper, you will find a complex interweaving of theme, plot, character and setting that results in a magical reading experience. Remington is almost a unique character in crime fiction in that he comes from a functional family. His parents loved him and he loved his parents; while Remington doesn't seem conscious of it, the reader quickly learns that both parents taught him skills that made him a great man.
And of course, nature is a prominent theme as well as a symbol in DOUBLE EXPOSURE. The dark of night is essential to build up the suspense, but it plays a role also in the idea that man is destroying nature. So Remington's manic race is not just a race for his life, but a race for nature. Can they both make it out alive?
Brilliant.
Beautiful.
Must-read!
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