Customer Reviews

Killer Weekend (Sun Valley Series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Ridley Pearson's a fine writer, but I was somewhat disappointed with KILLER WEEKEND. This novel is written like a James Patterson novel, with lean writing, very short chapters and a relatively fast pace.

Unfortunately, like a Patterson book, the characterization in this book is very thin, verging on cardboard in many cases. There is a large cast of characters in this rather short book, and most of them struck me as underdeveloped. Only the main sheriff character really has a three dimensional personality. And even in the sheriff's case, much of his back story is left unexplained, although Pearson will presumably reveal more about him in later books in the series.

KILLER WEEKEND is also kind of slow to get going. This is not really a thriller, but more of a whodunit. The first two thirds of this book is mainly a setup for the events of the last third. I didn't find this novel particularly exciting or involving until maybe the last hundred pages or so.

In short, this novel is easy to read, but not particularly compelling. I think there are far better choices out there for your reading time. Still, if you like James Patterson's writing style, you may want to give KILLER WEEKEND a try.

Lou Bolt! Daphne? Where are you? Rather, where is the great character development and the understated intrigue that comes up and slams you from Ridley Pearson? I like Sun Valley,too. I like the sexy waitresses and great food in the SawTooth, and the hanging canoe, and the shellacked table in the Pioneer. But describing these and all the other places Ridley knows and loves in Sun Valley is not literary genius. It is contrived and boring. Come on Ridley! Give us some of the old razzamatazz!!!

Pierce Scranton M.D.
author, "Death on the Learning Curve"

(This is a copy of my comment added to the last customer review. I felt the need to add my own 2 stars.)

This is my first and last Pearson book. Not only were the characters under-developed and the plot full of holes, but the writing was terrible. I found myself having to read many sentences several times to get the meaning, as he put far too much information into one sentence. I've taken the trouble to copy some of them:

"With O'Brien attending a dessert function at Trail Creek Cabin, where the commissioner of the FCC was giving an informal talk on the Politics of Policy to forty-five special ticket holders, he'd suggested meeting Walt at the Hemingway Memorial.

The Warm Springs tributary to the Big Wood slipped past beneath the concrete bridge connecting the Sun Valley's River Run high-speed quad-chairlifts and the glorious River Run ski lodge.

By 8 a.m. he was overseeing Brandon's leadership in securing Sun Valley Road Police Department's attempts to contain the burgeoning number of First Rights protesters who twice had broken through a barricade trying to get closer to the inn and the C3 gathering, only to be pushed back to the area allotted them."

Boring and confusing sentence structure. They could have been broken up and written so much more fluidly. After reading the last one for the third time, I wanted to chuck the book out the window.

Yes, if you like James Patterson, you will like this book. I have always thought that Patterson was the absolute worst writer in popular contemporary fiction. Pearson is not as bad, but still a waste of precious reading time. There are so many better writers out there in the same genre. I will not give him another chance.

I am a long-standing Ridley Pearson fan, but, before I gave up half-way through, this book kept feeling like it was written for a bad prose contest. It truly has the feel of the worst of James Patterson's ghost-written novels (The Quickie). I hope that Ridley will be returning to form (and to his classic characters) in the very near future.

Not quite sure how to play this one. I really enjoy Pearson's Boldt series, but this one... not that great, I hate to admit.

I felt disconnected while reading this; like reading it because it's there but the author fails to suck you into the story. Strange, but true. I found the characters were the same as everything else I've read - nothing to draw them apart, make them special. You get a glimpse of Walt's past and understand why he and his father are always tense around each other, but in the now, Walt should have been able to get over that. I'm sure to a twelve-year-old it was too much, but as adults - I mean, come on! Enough is enough already. All the talk about Walt and his wife no longer together, that it didn't work and yet, his feelings at finding out his ex-wife is with someone else, let alone a co-worker is spinning him around. I have to give kudos to Pearson, however: Walt is a very smart sheriff. I'm glad he solved it.

And yet, still, with all the characters in the book, there's nothing personal in it. While there are a couple of scenes between two secondary characters, it was more of a set up for what happens, and I felt cheated. You don't get to the heart of any of the characters except for Walt, and even then it feels disconnected. The synopsis of the book talks about Liz, but she isn't even close to a primary character in the book, even if all the events are surrounding her. It's like there should have been a previous book on both characters so that you understand them better.

And the whole killer in disguise thing - it's been done before. Mind you, the way Pearson put it in his book was pretty inventive. And what he does to the dog... while I found that a little `tacky', pretty inventive as well. Some might freak on the whole "animal cruelty' thing, but the dog is fine, nothing happens to her, so get off it already.

All in all, while it was pretty good and it had some high points, especially near the end, it still fell far short of expectations... and I hate it when that happens.

Walt Fleming is a small-town sheriff, but Quantico-trained and unusually competent. We're given to understand this in the prologue to Killer Weekend, when Walt pieces together clues anyone else might have overlooked and saves the life of Liz Shaler, the Attorney General of New York State, who maintains a second home in Idaho's Sun Valley. Eight years later Shaler is set to announce her candidacy for the presidency at a conference at the Sun Valley Inn. The event would be a logistical nightmare for Walt and his staff under the best of conditions. But he has reason to believe that Shaler is being targeted by an assassin who will make his move when she makes her announcement.

Pearson tells his story from Walt's perspective as well as the assassin's. Milav Trevalian is himself supremely competent at his job. One admires, despite the nature of the task, his painstaking preparations for the kill. Interestingly, he turns out to be a relatively likable character, both because of his professionalism and because, despite his resumé, he shows moments of humanity. Indeed, his humanity turns out to be his Achilles heel.

Unfortunately, Trevalian's motivation is never explored. We never learn why Shaler is in his crosshairs or what the stakes are for him personally. There are other loose ends. Walt's brother is dead, for example, and Pearson hints at deeper issues connected with his death, but we're never told the story. Finally, the book's prologue--in which Walt saves Shaler's life for the first time--makes promises that are never fulfilled. Pearson puts the proverbial gun on the mantle in act one when he describes the means by which that night's intruder enters Shaler's home. Readers expecting that gun to go off by the book's end, however, will wait in vain.

Pearson's principal characters, both good guys and bad, are interesting enough to make us want to read on. The story becomes more complex the deeper into the book we get. The writing doesn't distract from the plot. And the short chapters go by fast enough. Killer Weekend never quite becomes an edge-of-your-seat thriller. But it's a near miss.

-- Debra Hamel

I had grown a bit tired of Ridley Pearson's Lou Boldt series, with the shrink Daphne Matthews trailing along behind. The author had the two characters have an affair, then stop it, and then...well it just sort of petered out. So now the author decides he's going to try something new, and of course the main character is something different. Instead of a big city policeman, we have a rural elected sheriff. His name is Walt Fleming, and his county is in rural Idaho, so he is out doing his thing in all kinds of weather and of course lots of intimidating terrain.

The current story, the first in the series, starts with a flashback. Eight years before the book, Walt stopped a guy who was trying to kill the Attorney General of New York, who vacations in Sun Valley. Walt, a rookie sheriff's deputy, manages to thwart the guy, and the AG is forever in his debt. In the present, she's attending a conference in Walt's neighborhood, and plans to announce her plans to run for president from that conference. However, Walt is informed of a horrible murder some distance away, and contrives to decide that the killer is making his way to the conference with the intent of killing the AG while she's announcing her candidacy. The killer, it turns out, is pretty clever, and Walt has his hands full catching the guy.

I had a few problems with this book. No state's attorney general is ever going to announce their candidacy for the presidency, not without some national exposure in some more prominent office, typically governor or senator. I had a few technical problems with some of the ideas in the book, though I suppose they might be more correct than I thought. I also thought that the plot was a bit contrived at times, with Walt constantly saving the attorney general lady. Those things being said, it's an interesting book, and I enjoyed it.

...It reminded me of James Patterson's books because the chapters were so short and the story was very fast-paced. Pearson's writing style is also very similar to Patterson's, but I think Pearson's language is a little bit more complex.

It's mainly a story about an underdog Sheriff, Walt Fleming, in a small town trying to protect the Attorney General, Liz Shaler, (whose life he saved eight years prior) from being assassinated at a conference where she plans to announce her candidacy for President. It all takes place in one weekend, and the killer's plot for assassinating the AG is pretty unique and kind of disturbing. There is also another side plot going on throughout the whole story involving some elite characters and a cougar. Yes, a cougar.

This was a good page-turner. I was a little confused in the beginning, though, because several characters were introduced at once so it took me a few chapters to get them all straightened out with their corresponding story lines. I pressed on, and I finished the book in about two days. It's a very fast, entertaining read but a little on the light side for being a suspense/thriller, but there are enough surprise moments that make up for that lightness. This would probably be a good beach read or something for the car or on the plane during a trip.

Small town sheriff Walt Fleming is thrust into the role of protecting US Attorney General, Elizabeth Shaler, from an unknown hired assassin. Sound like a routine thriller novel? Not the way author Ridley Person handles it. Short chapters, crisp dialogue, fast action, diverse characters and a twisting plot make "Killer Weekend" a well-written pager-turner.

Several reviewers had panned the novel's character development as shallow and thin. I can only say that I did not find that to be a problem. I did not find myself yearning for greater insight into the characters' personas. What was given was fine and did not detract from the fast-moving storyline. This was my second Ridley Person novel that I've read and enjoyed. There are enough original elements that would keep me reading more of his Walt Fleming novels.

When I was around halfway through Ridley Pearson's Killer Weekend, someone asked me about it. It's okay, I said, but he's done better. By the time I reached the end of the book, my judgment hadn't changed.

Killer Weekend introduces a new series character for Pearson, Sheriff Walt Fleming of Blaine County, Idaho (which is in the Sun Valley area). Fleming rose to prominence after saving the life of Liz Shaler, who eight years earlier was an attorney general for New York. Now, she's about to announce her run for the presidency, and she intends to do it at a high-level business conference in Sun Valley. She isn't a candidate yet, however, so her protection is limited to a small Secret Service detail and a mishmash of private and public cops, most notably Walt himself.

Walt's involvement is a good thing, as he's one of a few who is taking seriously rumors of a hired assassin. The assassin, the ruthless Milav Trevalian, has come under the guise of a blind man, and has set up a second identity as well in which to operate. His unfolding plan is pretty clever, and it will fall upon Walt to try and identify and stop him. He will have other problems to contend with as well, including his estranged wife sleeping with his deputy, a wayward nephew falling into a life of crime and another, seemingly disconnected murder involving the wife of a local bigwig.

On a technical level, there is little wrong with Killer Weekend, but it also never drew me in. As a villain, Trevalian is intelligent but not very compelling and Walt Fleming is not all that engaging either. Compared to Pearson's other series character - Lou Boldt - I just found Fleming to be dull. Killer Weekend is not a bad book, but it's not a really good one either: Pearson has done better, in almost anything else he's written.