Customer Reviews

Revenge

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This book, a Detective Larry Cole mystery, is a posthumous publication, Holton having died in 2001. There is no indication that anyone has added to it, so I can only presume that Holton had completed it, or appeared to have completed it, before he died. I say "appeared to have completed it" because it reads like an early draft that needs work, a lot of work.

The plot revolves around a young woman, Morgana Devoe, whose guardian was murdered when she was thirteen, and who is intent on revenge. She arrives in Chicago intending to kill the murderer, and becomes involved with Cole's son, Larry, Jr. (known as Butch), who is a police cadet. It turns out that she is actually the daughter of Margo and Neil DeWitt, married serial killers who were Cole's nemeses, but who are now dead. Their multi-billion dollar holdings are now being administered by a very nasty piece of work, lawyer Franklin Butler, and his assistant, Susanne York, who is also out for revenge on a variety of people.

This book fails on many levels. While Holton's writing was never the best, his mysteries could generally succeed in the plotting. But the prose in this book is so stilted and repetitious that the best of plots could not survive it, and this is not the best of plots. It's all over the place, wildly incoherent, and he leaves a lot of loose ends. The ending is over the top, even for Holton, and includes a bit of graphic sex, something that I do not recall from his other books (though, admittedly, it's been quite a while since I read one)

The absence of editing is evident, not only in typos, but in such things as the misuse of words ("implicated", where "implied" is clearly what was meant), wrong names being used, and what the film world calls "continuity". Morgana lives in what is described in the space of two pages as a "town house", then a "penthouse", then a "townhouse" again. In one place, her home is on North Sheridan Road, then on Lake Shore Drive. (The book is set in Chicago, and these are real streets that do not intersect.)

Because the book is set is a specific, real, location, at a specific time, details can and should be verified. As a lawyer, I'm particularly annoyed at the many errors in law and legal procedure, with which, as a long-time Chicago police officer, Holton should have been conversant. He should have known that no trial court judge could allow cameras in a courtroom, as that's a violation of Illinois Supreme Court Rules. He should have known that motions to suppress statements are heard pre-trial by a judge, not as part of a jury trial. While occasionally one must allow an author literary license so that he can improve the story or move it along, the errors in this book do neither.

The book is copyrighted by Holton's daughter, and I appreciate that she probably wanted her father's last work published, but it needed considerable editing and revision before being in publishable form.

Larry Cole, Jr. and his father share a special relationship. He loves and respects his father so much; he joins the police department to follow in his father's footsteps. Larry excels in the police academy, and exhibits great potential of being a fine officer, but his father worries about his naiveté on the job. Unbeknownst to them, they will meet a person linked to their past.

Morgana DeVoe swore revenge on the man who killed her uncle and left her for dead. Eight years later, her search has ended, and she begins to carry out her plan. On the night of her deadly plan, Morgana and Larry are struck by the "lightning bolt", as their eyes gazed upon each other. Larry is unaware the exotic woman of beauty who holds his heart may be a cold-blooded killer.

The first 50 pages were slow for me, but as I began to read further into the book, the plot thickened. REVENGE delivers to its reader a plethora of police procedurals, explosive and intense action, thrills, lies, and diabolical revenge.

Reviewed by Sharon Lewis
of The RAWSISTAZ(tm) Reviewers