Customer Reviews

Isle of Dogs

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(41)
1 star:		(624)

 

 

It's hard to believe that the creator of Kay Scarpetta wrote this. The humor is lowbrow, the situations and characters are crass and unbelievable, the plot is weak. Cornwell's created a universe where everyone is on the decline, or never got high enough to have a decline. They are ugly, stupid and rotten except for the shrinking Hammer and the irritating Brazil. It's tough to read a book where literally every piece of action requires someone to be incredibly stupid. It's beyond farce, it's even beyond slapstick. It's just stupid. If this book were written by anyone other than Cornwell it would never have been published.

"Madcap" can only be used as a description of this mess if you throw an "r" in between the c and the a. Literally. For...what's that sound? Ah, the scraping of the bottom of the barrel, herein represented by the author's continual use of bowel humor.

I'm an avid Cornwell reader who feels ripped off by this throw away effort. Even if you totally unhook your reality tethers, this book is STILL moronic. The premise is lame, the characters unbelievable and annoying at best, but more often teeth-grindingly obnoxious.

If any reader can honestly say that even one snippet of this book works for them, I've got a bridge available to sell you. From the supposed governor of Virginia, on down through various political figures and appointees, right through to the heroine (who acts like she's ON heroin) and the namby-pamby twirp Andy AKA Trooper Truth -- ack! I'm just riling myself up for no good reason. If you must have this, wait a month and snag it out of the bargin bin.

Not to rant, but I'm noticing a disturbing theme of brand-name authors crossing genre to rake in the big bucks at the expense of their loyal book buying public - Patterson, Grisham, Baldacci, et al.

Nope, I certainly don't mind change, and appreciate how difficult it must be for an author to keep going back to the well for fresh ideas. Isle of Dogs, however, feels as though Cornwell picked "screwball comedy" out of a grab bag of plot ideas at the best-selling-author Christmas party last year.

What's next? Lou Boldt's Favorite Recipes by Ridley Pearson? Sue Grafton shoving Kinsey Milhone into a rousing pirate-infested romance novel? (Q is for Quartermaine?) Ack...I digress.

Plain and simple. Want a funny detective book? Buy anything by Janet Evanovich. Want suspense? Try Linda Fairstein's The Dead House. Want to feel like you wasted your money? Buy this.

This is really bad. Really bad. Bad, bad novel. I gave it one star because there aren't any negative stars in the reviewers' pull-down menu. Thank goodness I got it for 20 cents as a book-club enrollment offer. But I wish I'd selected the tote bag instead.

This book establishes that Cornwell will have to write off any thought of ever using Judy Hammer and Andy Brazil as serious characters again. They deserved better, despite being weak creations to begin with. They could have developed into an ordinary, somewhat likeable crew for a police-procedural series. Instead, they're well on their way to becoming shallow and ludicrous cardboard cutouts.

Poor Andy, who began life as a somewhat competent journalist, becomes a masked-crusader Web author -- Trooper Truth -- with a badly-conceived public-service mission. Chapters of the novel are interspersed with truly dreadful Trooper Truth columns, rambling, badly-written, poorly-researched, lurid, condescending pieces indeed. If my eighth-grade grandson ever wrote a history paper as truly stupid as Trooper Truth's lesson on mummies, I'd have him in summer school until he turned 35. Judy Hammer also fares badly, and a particularly labored subplot about her kidnapped dog makes her silly rather than sympathetic.

Obviously, the author has no understanding of the culture of Tangier Island -- having used it as a contagion site in an earlier Scarpetta novel, she should have left it alone thereafter. Instead, she recycles her left-over notes on the location and performs an all-out and somewhat ugly lampoon this time out. And she doesn't do the Commonwealth of Virginia any great service, either, creating a dotty, half-blind governor who is so one-dimensionally absurd that he fails as a caracature and seems to exist solely as a vehicle for potty jokes. Even Mr. Magoo was loveable. Hiassen's Skink is a classic example of the Wise Fool. Governor Crimm is a whining oaf and his family and advisors are weak adolescent humor at its tasteless nadir -- not even good satire.

If Cornwell is trying to duplicate Carl Hiaasen's deft satirical scalpel, she'd be better off abandoning the attempt; the reader can balance Hiaasen's concern for the fragile Florida environment against his dislike for the developers and tourists who exploit it. Cornwell apparently neither loves Virginia nor its law-enforcement workers and is determined to milk everything in sight for cheap laughs. There's no cerebral humor here -- just school-yard slapstick that's far too fragile to sustain a full-length novel.

It's bad enough that each successive Kay Scarpetta novel becomes more issue-driven, losing ground to the vastly better-delivered work of Kathy Reichs. Isle of Dogs gives every indication of having been tossed off as an easy way to finance Cornwell's rather peculiar and self-congratulatory Jack the Ripper research trip. It's a shame when authors start believing their own reviews and decide that their fans will, sheeplike, cherish everything that falls from their word processors. One has to wonder what Cornwell's editor was thinking of; usually, edotors try to make their best-selling authors look good even in their weaker moments. Is it possible that we have a case of an imperious, arrogant author who has cheesed off her publishers enough that they're letting her readers see what she's really like?

No, next time, definitely the tote bag.

I have read all of Cornwell's Dr Kay Scarpetta novels and also the two other beakaway books (Southern Cross and Hornets Nest) and have to say that I was terribly disappointed in Isle of Dogs. If it were by any other author I would never have bothered finishing it but I kept hoping that some of the brilliant crime writing that I've grown to love from Cornwell would suddenly appear...not so.
The essays on Trooper Truth's website had me scratching my head wondering what on earth they had to do with the storyline. The talking crabs left me dumbfounded. And the almost total lack of mystery and serious crime writing made me decide once and for all that I would only read Cornwell's Scarpetta novels, no more Judy Hammer and Andy Brazil for me.
The one bright moment when Dr Scarpetta was brought into the story was soon extinguished as she lasted less than a chapter before Fonny Boy and his backwards talking started again.
If you are a fan of Patricia Cornwell's Dr Kay Scarpetta series then I would not recommend this book. But if you are after a light comedy and don't mind the lack of gripping forensic science that has made Cornwell famous then this book is for you.

I really love Patricia Cornwell's novels, and am SO disappointed in this one. It's a highly unbelievable plot with unrealistic caricatures of people...I didn't "like" any of the characters. The most frustrating aspect is being forced to decipher the language of the Island people. A little dialogue? OK. Pages and pages of mumbo-jumbo that forces the reader to read slowly to decipher is mean!

If it's supposed to be funny, shouldn't the reader laugh...at least once? I did cringe several times.

My favorite part is when flatulent ole Crimm is convinced that his wife Maude (described as 70-years-old and looking clown-like having had too many cosmetic procedures) is having affairs with hot, young men. See, he thinks she is hiding men in the linen closet but she's REALLY hiding trivets that she's buying over the internet (she's not supposed to be wasting money on trivets, you see). Ha! Ha! What a zany mix-up!

Am I really amused or is that just "backward talk?"

You decide.

I have a crooked table leg to fix...

Until this book, Patricia Cornwell was one of my favorite authors. I am just so disappointed her. This book attempts to be funny but fails miserably. The conversations are stilted and stupid. Picture this: two crabs talking to each other. I kid you not.
Don't bother with this one. Simply hope Cornwell comes up with an other Scarpetta book soon.

Have read many Cornwell books. Find they are becoming cookie cutter. Isle of Dogs is one of the worst books I have ever endured. She must have written it as an adolescent and just now published it. Character names like Ima Clot and Uva Clot, Fonny Boy, and Trooper Truth are only made worse by crabs that talk about someone's bad driving and later climb out of the Chesapeak on to a boat motor and throw a metal object in the air. A dog who types on the internet only makes the criminals more senile. Ms. Unique who mystically changes into a Nazi and loves to cut people. The governor's daughter who, out of nowhere, is suddenly a lesbian. Save your money. Save paper and stop the presses. This is surely my last book by Cornwell. "Be careful out there."

I'm a huge Cornwell fan, and I can't believe she wrote this. It has absolutely no good points. Don't even check it out at the library, it's not even worth reading for free! I'm from Richmond, VA and am ashamed that this book was set here. Please do not waste your time reading the book cover. Crabs, fish and lobsters have dialogue in this book. Enough said.

If you're looking for a good mystery story - this isn't it. The biggest mystery here is how this book ever made it to print.

Having read all of Patricia Cornwell's books over the years, I was anxiously awaiting this new release. As usual, I started it as soon as it arrived, but soon found myself having to re-read the first chapter after having realized that it wasn't a dream sequence or being narrated by some psychopath. After I had endured nearly half of the book, a morbid sense of curiosity as to how bad it could get, compelled me to finish it. Believe me, this curiosity was not disappointed. The plot actually was not that bad, unfortunately it was the lack of support by the characters, situations, dialogue, etc. that ruined this story.

In closing, if you enjoy finishing a book with the desire to read the next in the series, not the desire to send the author a bill for time ill spent, stay off the "Ilse of Dogs".

MDS