Customer Reviews

Key to Conflict (Gillian Key, ParaDoc, Book 1)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

I don't like to give negative reviews to first novels that are trying hard, but this book was too aggravating for me to recommend. I expected it to be a fantasy/romance crossover book, with a strong heroine and (most likely) a love interest or two. What I got was an obnoxious TSTL heroine who had too many different love interests after her.

The main character was rude, irrational, and sometimes just mean. She started out her psychology sessions by telling the guy to sit down and shut up, then told them how to get over it (whatever the problem). So I didn't like the main character. But the supporting characters, who were mostly fine, each had an even greater flaw: each of them liked her, for some reason. Oh, it was told to the reader why she was so neat, but she certainly didn't come across that way.

I'd like to say these are simply flaws in a new writer, but unfortunately these flaws ruined the book for me. It's going straight to the library pile. I'll try the author's next one, though. Maybe she'll get better.

You probably have read a book that was terrible to start with, but you kept reading it because you hate to give up on the book, or because you hope it will get better. Well, this book was like that for me. In fact, I dislike this book intensely for many reasons.
First, the writing was more telling, than showing, way too detailed (believe it or not) and frankly aggravating. Everything is explained to the reader, which I think is frowned upon in Freshman Creative Writing classes.
The main character was supposed to be a USMC Officer, which came off completely unconvincing. I found myself actively disliking her and her behavior. She was undisciplined, rude and her judgement was terrible, which wouldn't be expected in an Officer with significant alleged combat leadership experience. She also paired up sexually with two brothers (essentially) and a ghost throughout the course of the book, and I found that objectionable.
I completely understand the concept of fantasy and suspension of disbelief, but this book was ridiculous. What sort of therapist was she? The kind that inspired vapid, "Oh, she's so smart, and solved all my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder problems in basically one session," and simultaneously inspires erections in every single male she encounters, even those who dislike her. The words used to describe the main character were petite, delicate, and beautiful, and everyone wants to protect her, or spank her, which I also found aggravating.
I have to admit the image that comes to my mind when thinking about a female Marine do not match those descriptors. I have all the respect in the world for real Marines, but I don't think this irritating character would have made it through Boot.
And what is it about every single character being extraordinarily beautiful, gorgeous, lovely, etcetera? The only person who wasn't beautiful was Jack the Ripper (non-essential spoiler). And when talking about the pairings of all the characters with (multiple) sex partners as well as "Mates", it was arousal/lust/anger at first sight and beyond that, there was basically no character development.
I'm frankly mad that I wasted my time with this book, and I urge you to believe me. I love romance novels, and I love sci-fi/fantasy (as this was billed), but this was a terrible story covered in a massive amount of extraneous words (over which I found myself skipping).
Needless to say, this author is definitely on my skip list.

Every once in a while there is a book that is so gleeful in its ineptness and so unrepentant in its insanity, it manages to lift itself off the absolute bottom of the barrel and becomes an entertaining laugh riot. That is Key to Conflict's saving grace and why it gets a two star instead of one star. Objectively, this may just be the worst book I've ever read. However, its crazy plot and lousy writing style also manage to make it one of the funniest. I haven't laughed this hard since Triggerfish Twist, and that was supposed to be a funny book.

Gillian Key is a total Mary Sue. She's only twenty-six but she's a decorated marine who has fought all over the world, a PhD, world famous vampire therapist for the undead, and mind-blowing great lover. Let's not even try to figure out how she has time to do all this stuff. Unfortunately, intelligent and sensible human being is not among her list of titles. Gillian is also a rude, violent, stupid human being. She constantly goes around insulting people and starting fights. For some reason, everyone thinks she's just the bees knees for it. That she has sass and vitality when its just rank stupidity. For example, during a super important peace summit between the humans and vampires, girl idiot here received a necklace from one of the vampire delegates and she decided to stab him in the face with it.

Gillian finds herself in the Carpathian mountains to give therapy to one Count Aleksei Rachlav. He suffers from fangxiety! Her idea of therapy seems to be to fire off insults while her patient tells her his life story and lust after him in her head. Back to the lousy writing style, during their first session the perspective shifts back and forth between them like five times in three pages and they muse over the main theme of "I want you, baby." Get used to this ping-pong ball style of narration, because the author bounces between subjects and character point of views with no rhyme or reason. In one scene, Gillian is being choked to death and in the middle of that it goes from the subject of Satanists to Gillian's upbringing before going back to the throat crushing. Then there's the prose. The horrible purple prose. Before the first chapter is over, Gillian's personal area is described as being "turgid with a sensual perfume".

Quite a bit of time is spent on describing Gillian's happy bits because if she doesn't actually have sex with a character, he certainly wants to do it with her. The sex scenes are comedy gold. The Count has a brother. Gillian punches him in the face, he spanks her butt, she throws him down a hill, and then they get it on as if they were champion contortionists. Gillian's other patient is a ghost who can temporarily made himself solid. The ghost starts sneaking in her room to give her some Midnight Delight. The ghost is invisible while he does this, and Gillian's other lover walks into the room and gets in bed with her with the same idea. I thought for a moment that the ghost was going to get some surprise sodomy. I nearly died laughing.

Back to the crazy plot, Count Dracula wants to kill all humans basically. He's such an evil dude that instead of killing Gillian, he sends evil minions to jump out of her car and yell "Boo!" The Rachlav brothers and Gillian decide to fight back against his evil scheme because vampires are really all about peace, love, and justice. They enlist the help of the most powerful vampires. These guys are almost god-like in power and they want to help, really, but they just can't kill Dracula because.... well, for reasons that don't make sense in any place outside of bizarro world. If they did swat the bad guys like flies Gillian couldn't wave a gun around, cap a few guys in the kneecaps, and play super Marine!

In the end nothing is resolved, not the situation resulting from Gillain wanting hanky-panky with both Rachlav brothers and Dracula is still on the loose. There's just some vague promise that they'll get that villian next time. My spidey senses are tingling in warning that Talia Gryphon plans to inflict a sequel upon the reading public. The sad thing is that I'd probably buy it just to laugh at the literary trainwreck again.

Writing is a hard discipline and in many ways utterly thankless, so I congratulate Gryphon on finishing the book and getting it published. That said, I wish she'd put a little more work into it. I gave this book a fair shot, but the writing is clunky, with things explained multiple times, and lots of editorial errors. The lead character is contradictory within her own personality. She's supposed to be a therapist, but she could use some therapy for herself. And it seems every vampire is a "Count?" Weird. And then there's the fact that when her vampire lover gets upset with her, he spanks her. That's right. Spanks her. This is not sexual spanking, not a little BDSM going on, this is plain old punishment spanking. And she puts up with it. Where's the tough Marine? Would YOU submit to a spanking because your lover was angry with you? But then, the idea of spanking her like a recalcitrant child was brought up almost immediately in this book. Again, I stress, this is not spanking in a sexual situation, but punishment. I couldn't believe what I was reading.

This book... was a complete Mary Sue fanfic. I don't know how else to describe it. It wasn't horrific for about 2/3 of the book, but then it became horribly obnoxious at the end.

I picked it up because it had an interesting cover and the book description sounded like something I'd be into. I love a good vampire story.

The main character is supposed to be a Marine Special Forces operative. Well, for a Marine, she's extremely wimpy. But only when there's big strong man around. She can kick butt when she's alone.

There was a wretched overuse/abuse of the adjective "little." Such as, "little human," "little female," "little doctor," "little Marine" ... you get the picture. I think I strained my eyes from rolling them so much.

Every male she meets falls instantly in lust with her, of course. Or they want to protect her. (Hello... Marine?) She's a delicate little flower who needs to be protected in the big, bad world.

And apparently she's the world's best shrink, because she can cure centuries-old vampires' and ghosts' problems in one session. Of course she can, because she's perfect. Though, for a shrink, she's quite rude to her patients.

Also a peeve... whenever another female character is introduced, a member of her party instantly falls in love with her. How bloody annoying.

The story sounded so promising, but it didn't live up to my expectations, which aren't that high to begin with. The book was also riddled with errors that made me twitch.

Save your money, or else borrow it from the library.

I love stories where the heroine is very tough and can take care of herself. I picked this up thinking the main character resembled Ripley in the Aliens movie. Unfortunately this goes out the window about 30 pages into the book. It turns into a bosom heaver!!!! If you are looking for that kind of book then great, I however was very disappointed. I sorta lost respect for the main character w/ all that carrying on.

I'm no expert and I've never written a book, but even I could have done better than this! I should have read the reviews before buying it, at least I bought it used. The author beats you over the head with the same idea again and again, just changing the wording. She tries to make the heroine seem like a real trooper, but she's really a neurotic cream puff with no self control and even less common sense. By the third chapter I already couldn't stand her or the main vampire characters. What can I say, please don't waste your time with this book. I gave up reading because it had no real plot line and even worse written lines. It goes over how bad Dracula is without ever moving closer to that particular plot line. Wow, this had to be the worst I've ever read!

Really, this has to be the worst novel I've read...but in a way I'm thankful, I've been wanting to write for quite some time, so I'm going to force myself to re-read this quarterly until my own books are complete. Specifics? Having been a Marine I can tell you we don't continually try to piss off the big bad unless either we're going to kill it, or we're to the point where we want it to kill us. Factual, the scene where the werewolf that can't change due to a phobia freaks out because his brain is in BETA state? Um, I may not be a PHD in psych, but I know that beta brainwaves are predominately produced in normal waking consciousness. Too many others to go into, but really, thanks, I know I can do better than this.

Well, other reviewers have written good comments on this book. I'll write what actually got me online and prompted this review.

I do not get how the whole "I'm widdle and cute and adowable but commanding and dangerous too" female got started, or how it got past professional editorial departments (my respect for publishers has gone vastly downhill over the years). This type of character doesn't work. Period. It's too stupidly gratuitous to even grant respect.

Pick a character and stick with it. If someone is commanding and dangerous, have the guts to write that person as commanding and dangerous. If a character is widdle and cute and adowable, then write that character that way. Another author who does this type of disaster is Jacquelyne Frank in her first novel Jacob. (Come to think of it, I should review that too.) At any rate, there is no way the main character in this book, Gillian Key, had anything to do with commanding men. The thought is too ludicrous to bear. If someone like her was in a command position, her team would eat her for breakfast, and rightly so. For God's sake.

Sometimes you hear about a book so awful, so badly written, so freaking unbelievably poor plotted, you just have to read it for yourself.

Gillian Key is a Marine Corp captain, a world-renowned paramortal psychologist and the prettiest darn thing you ever did see. On the pretense of treating a four-hundred-year old vampire with depression, she's undercover in Romania scoping out information on Dracula, who may or may not be about to wage war on humanity. Unfortunately, Gillian is having trouble respecting the client-doctor boundary because, naturally, her patient, Alecksei, is intolerably sexy. As is his brother, Tanis. As is the ghost she's treating for post-traumatic-stress syndrome.

Gillian is a first class Mary Sue. She's blonde, green-eyed, curvy, intelligent, fierce, a decorated battle vet and a fantastic lover. Every man who meets her immediately decides to bed her. I can't imagine why they would, personally. If she's not yelling at her patients or fighting with their families, she's on her tiptoes screaming that she's a Marine, dammit! and doesn't need anyone to look after her. She's also a violent bully who takes issue with pretty much everything anyone says to her. She's like Scrappy Doo - forever picking fights with people far stronger than her and getting away with it because she's just too darn cute! The men she meets simply melt into goo when she does something stupid, because she's so brave to do it! And also cute!

Secondary characters are inconsistent in their behaviour - Tanis, for example starts the book as a growling neanderthal who believes it's his God-given right to spank women to "put them in their place," but ends it as a tender-hearted wuvbunny after a magical encounter with Gillian's swamplike nether regions. Dracula, plugged throughout as the World's Greatest Evil, appears for one paragraph and spends it drooling over Gillian. Other characters are simply there to admire her, even when she's being a completely unreasonable cow.

Realistic behaviour takes a back seat too. Despite Gillian's frequent reminders that she's a marine and a world-famous psychologist, she never behaves with a soldier's discipline or a psychologist's intelligence. I have something of a military background, and if a soldier spoke to their commanding officer the way Gillian speaks to hers, they'd be court-martialled faster than you can say "Private Benjamin." Another issue is the question of time-scale. The book purportedly takes place over the course of a year, yet weeks and months are skipped over and it seems to be perpetually autumn no matter how much time passes, giving the book a disjointed feel.

Editing and grammar are poor (that's probably not a surprise, given that Gryphon is a protege of Laurell K Hamilton), and missing commas wreck havoc on the sentence structure throughout. Info-dumping wastes huge swathes of paper that could be happily pumping oxygen into the atmosphere as a tree somewhere. Gryphon is apparently convinced that, unless she reiterates it every other page, the reader might forget Gillian's profession, hair colour, eye colour and bra size.

In conclusion, awkwardly-written, ill-contrived and unintentionally hilarious in places, this is a book that fans of the new LKH books will lap up. Everyone else, I wouldn't bother if I were you.