Customer Reviews

Medusa: A Pacific Northwest Mystery

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

 

 

In Elliot Bay, twelve-year old Tim Diamond and his two friends and next door neighbors, Henry and Pearl are playing pirates on the family yacht, the Caprice. The next thing anyone knows is nine-year-old Pearl is missing and presumed drowned. Henry swears that he saw Tim tie her up, push her in, jump into the water and hold her head under until she was dead. On the basis of Henry's testimony, Tim is arrested and though he is out of jail, he is wearing an electronic bracelet.

Tim's brother Bart calls Venus in Hawaii and begs her to come home to figure out what is happening. Venus, an undercover agent with the United States Fish and Wildlife agency, uses her police powers to horn in on the local investigation. The further she digs, the more she learns that her brother's story about a giant jelly fish taking Pearl away is true and the players in the game are some of her old enemies in the Russian Mafia. Much blood will be shed and many lives will be lost when the authorities try to bring all the guilty parties to justice.

MEDUSA is a fascinating crime thriller with plenty of action, a touch of romance and some family humor to keep the tension levels at a certain level. The heroine risks her own life and freedom to make certain the guilty parties pay for what they did to her family. She is feisty and courageous protagonist and readers will adore. There are many sub-plots that tie back to the central theme of innocent children who trust the wrong people and pay the price.

Harriet Klausner

I've read a lot of bad books, but this is the first book I can describe as irritatingly horrible. It starts off ok, but the first few chapters give rise to credibility/believability issues that will plague the entire book. The books' plot surrounds main character Venus Diamond, a fish and wildlife agent who gets involved in the death of a young girl. Venus's step brother is accused of the crime, and Venus sets out to clear him. Thus follows a stumbling maze of events.

The first clue that the book has issues is when Venus is stalked and attacked by a giant manta ray with murderous intentions. She kills it by throwing her camera at it. Then she gets out of the water and goes to sunbath.

It just gets worse from there, with Venus's character development incredibly uneven and unrealistic. Example: when first learning that her step-brother is in trouble, she casually declines to leave the Oahu resort/rehab center she's staying at to go help him (we never do find out why she's in "rehab," only that it stems from an "intensely embarrassing" incident. Because people go to rehab for embarrassment). Later, after she's gone to his aid and he is killed, it's mentioned that her step-brother is her "heart and soul." Since when?

Everything about this book is annoying and just plain bad. The author casually introduces characters and kills them off in the same page. I tried to get a total of how many people are killed in this book, and it's something like twelve. The author also meanders between a writing style of short, staccato statments, and long, paragraph-length run on sentences. Every once in awhile she will try her hand at meaningful, deep prose, resulting in writing that makes me cringe. The subject matter is also cringe-worthy, involving car-smuggling and child pornography. One character, Lina, tries to kill herself by jumping out her hotel window into Elliott Bay. She then tries to swim out to sea (I think), and is picked up by the coast guard. Then she goes bananas after the rescue, and one page later slits her wrists. This is only one in a long line of disturbing death scenes, that add absolutely nothing to the story.

I have never written a bad review before, preferring to simply steer clear of any bad authors and forget about them. But something about this book got under my skin and I feel compelled to warn anyone off who is contemplating reading this author. How she ever got published, I don't know. To be fair, I've only read the one book. Maybe her other stuff is better. But I can say with one hundred percent certainty I will NEVER read anything else by her again.

ps...I wanted to give it zero stars but the program won't let me post without clicking at least one.

A book where most of the victims are children and pedophilia is the norm. Giant jellyfish roam the seas. It was all I had to read on a long plane flight, so I managed to finish it just to see if the end made sense. No, not really.

If all six of Skye Moody's Pacific Northwest Mysteries are as bloody as MEDUSA, it's a wonder that her fictional Seattle isn't depopulated by now. I hesitate to estimate the exact body count because the deaths come steadily and numerously as Seattle raindrops. The attrition on law enforcement types alone is staggering, not to mention the mortality rate among bad guys, children, and innocent bystanders.

Robert Ludlum has met his match in Ms Moody who mixes enough criminal conspiracies in with the bloodshed to fill several normal thrillers. Smuggling, child abuse, pornography, protection racketeering, industrial espionage,and toxic pollution are all crammed together with countless murders into a single hyperactive plot. The heroine, Venus Diamond, behaves like a cowboy vigilante, conducting illegal entries, thefts, and wiretaps.

Moody writes good, edgy dialogue and makes effective use of Seattle and Puget Sound as a backdrop for her story. Her female characters - both good and bad - are complex and interesting, but her men tend to be cartoonishly black or white. My objection to her plotting is its literal overkill.

I agree with one of the previous reviews. I read many mysteries, but this one did not make a lot of sense. It started out good, but by the middle it was so depressing and disjointed, I didn't even care who did it.

Wow. Talk about action. Every scene crackles with energy, and impending or actual disaster, so much so that the novel threatens to implode under its own ambition, but it never does. Give Moody credit. A lesser writer wouldn't have been able to handle a tenth of the plot elements in the book. But as it stands, Medusa is three hundred-twenty-five of the fastest pages you might ever read.

Medusa is filled with excitement, pathos, and humor. More thriller than whodunnit, it's the best book yet in the series, though it's probably not the best place to start. I think the book (and the deaths of some characters) might lose some impact if you're not already familiar with the characters.

Thank you, Ms. Moody, for another fine effort.