Customer Reviews

Fancy to Kill for

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

 

 

This novel seemed promising at the start, but I was soon distracted by some fairly basic usage/spelling errors, the sort that would have me reaching for my red pen if my college-age students wrote them -- and that I was very surprised to see in a book from a mainstream publisher like Random House. For example, a character is described as "demurring" when it's clear from the context that she is not "demurring" at all, but is in fact agreeing. Another character is described as being "barely able to breath," and then we get a howler like "Richard was not in the slightest bit phased." Sorry, but this is not professional-level writing/editing.

Still, I might have been willing to overlook such stumbles if the plot were plausible or the characters believable. But they aren't. We're asked to accept significant coincidences, some incongruous love-at-first-sight, and a murderer's plan that wouldn't have worked in a thousand years.

Plus, some of the narrative attitudes toward domestic violence are disturbing: after being slapped by her angry lover, one character, Joyce, "was honest enough to reckon that she probably deserved it." When the lover later apologizes, Joyce says, "No, I asked for it." It seems clear from the text that the author agrees.

Add to these problems a rather clunky structure (in which we're often simply told things when we ought to be shown them), and you have a book that I probably would not have finished had I not been stuck on an eight-hour plane ride with no other reading material.