Customer Reviews

Knockout [With Earbuds] (Playaway Adult Fiction)

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(31)

 

 

13th book in the FBI series that is more suspense than romance.

Savich gets a telepathic message from a 7 year-old girl just as he's falling asleep. She'd seen him on TV and knows he's a hero and she needs help, so tried to reach him. Her father's relatives have just recently learned of her existence and all are gifted with various powers to mess with someone else's mind. And they want her in their fold and will stop at nothing to grab her, even though she's surrounded by deputies and the sheriff.

As with most of the books, there is a 2nd issue taking place. Savich was a customer in a bank that was getting robbed and stops the robbery. One of the robbers is a 16 year-old girl who wants to kill Savich and the bank's security guard because her mother, another of the bank robbers, was killed in a shootout before they could escape with the loot. With her cousin's help, she's able to escape from a hospital and the hunt is on.

The romance? Between 7 year-old Autumn's mother and Sheriff Ethan Merriweather who come together to keep Autumn safe from her very scary uncle.

The book takes place a couple of months after Tailspin, so the homelife of Sherlock and Savich goes forward with Sherlock recovering from losing her spleen in the last book. The characters are interesting, the story moves fast, the suspense is good, and as always, the book contains a lot of humor.

I generally like Catherine Coulter books. I first read The Maze and was hooked on the FBI series. When this book came out I was really excited and rushed out to get it. I am so disappointed! The writing is not as good as it used to be & there is no chemistry between any of the characters including Sherlock and Savich. I feel like she's running out of ideas. Didn't she do a book with cults before? I also don't understand why Dillion has developed an ability to communicate with ghosts and missing little girls. I don't like the supernatural aspect that her books have seemed to pick up. That's not why I read her books. I feel this book was rushed, not thoroughly thought out and definitely not as good as her other ones. I feel cheated that I spent over $20. Won't read again.

It was an interesting book, very action oriented, not too much of the romance that I look for where they have so much Sherlock and Savich together. It's like they were missing something. Otherwise pleasantly paced and interesting. I like some action with some personal connections in her other books, it was lacking here, but the characters were fully formed and easy to understand. I think she also needs to work on her endings. They are too abrupt and don't snap closed enough for a good ending. I'd buy it again and read it again, just not with the same anticipation I had when I bought it. (Had the woman dig it out of the box for me, I was so excited. It did not live up to my expectations.)

I love my Kindle, but I am going to go back to ordering the books. $9.99 I am willing to pay but is anyone watching how the Kindle cost of books is shooting up? $14.-15.00 now? Why would I do that when I can order a used book for $2-3.00? Or for that matter go to the library and check it out for nothing!

In other episodes I've read from this series, Coulter used some restraint and kept the supernatural element to just a dash of spice. But in this one, she takes the hoodoo way over the line, letting it overwhelm the story and turn it into a shapeless mass. No plot-worthy parameters remain.

The characters flop, too. Coulter has always been noticeably cartoonish, but didn't run amok until this one.

She's also maddeningly repetitive, not just with statements, but with actions and events. Worst of all, the plot was so predictable that I found myself skipping large chunks, only to tune in later to find that things had gone exactly as I'd known they would. In fact, I fell asleep -- again -- just before the end, and couldn't stir up enough interest to rewind and finish it.

AUDIO:

The producers chose to do that awful thing of swapping between readers. Including this novel, I've never seen that done well. Rather, it's disruptive and distracting. Costanzo has a high pitch, almost adolescent, which saps strength from the story. Raudman is awful beyond belief. I thought I'd experienced the worst overacting possible in audio, but she trumps them all.

I have been a fan of Catherine Coulter's for decades and of Sherlock and Savich since they first appeared but this book failed on so many levels. With all the whining and worrying I was ready for a surprise revalation at the end of the book that one or both of them was leaving the FBI. The plot was so lacking that I find it hard to call it either a thriller or a romance. Trite, cliched and recycled are the best descriptors for this one. We have seen it all before- the small town police chief, the plane crash, the wise beyond their years child, the psychic elements, the psycho family members, even the injuries to either Sherlock or Savich. There are better versions of this story out there, even better versions by Coulter. Stick with them and leave this one at the store.

I couldn't wait to get my hands on another book by Catherine Coulter but this book was very disappointing.

I enjoy FBI thrillers and especially like Coulter's Sherlock and Savich characters. In this book, a seven year old girl, Autumn, has some special Marie Laveau voodoo going on and she and Dillion have established telepathic communication. I did not purchase this book to read about psychic powers. I purchased the book to read another FBI thriller based on some sort of logical events. If I wanted to read about paranormal I would have purchased that type of book.

Note to the author: No more story line with Dillion having telepathic/psychic communication ability. Get on with a good story line. Please give us back Dillion without all this voodoo.

If I had to best describe this book using one word it would be weird. I regret spending my time and money on this book.

I have been a fan of all the FBI Thriller Series by Catherine Coulter. However, KnockOut failed to fulfill the standard of story telling I have grown to expect from Catherine. It seemed to me that she should have simply written two separate books. The book went back and forth from one storyline to the next so often and so fast that I felt dizzy. I thought each of her storylines could have made a good book. But to put them together under one title was distracting. It was tiring just thinking of Savich and Sherlock and all the traveling they did from Washington, D.C. to the South. Also...any number of times during the book both the FBI and the local police forces seemed rather inept. I was very disappointed in this book and, needless to say, was happy when I finished it. I'm sad not to have her next book in this series to look forward to.

I picked up Knock Out because of the editor's synopsis...the premise sounded interesting and I'm always looking for authors that I've not read; however, this book, and I'm assuming the others from this author, was a mess. The two stories were not related, there was no purpose for Dillon's role in Joanna and Amanda's story. Chapters and even paragraphs were often disjointed, with unrelated thoughts. The dialogue wasn't what one would expect if you were overhearing these conversations. It was all just very strange and frustrating. This book was poorly written. I won't be reading another Catherine Coulter book.

Hardcover new from Amazon Marketplace $8.88. Used from Amazon Marketplace $0.70. Paperback from $9.99. Hang on--Kindle: $14.82!!!! How mentally challenged would someone need to be to buy the Kindle edition? Many of us are lured into buying a Kindle for a few hundred dollars with the expectation that books would download for $9.99. Two months after buying the Kindle, surprise! A 50% price increase. Pathetic. Let's do ourselves a favor and refuse to buy ANY book for more than $9.99. That is the only way the gouging publishers will roll back their pricing. I am a small publisher myself. When I sell a perfect bound book, my out of pocket cost is $6.00. When I sell a pdf electronic copy, my out of pocket cost is $0.00. Any publisher that says different is not stretching the truth--it is called lying. Readers of the world, unite!