Customer Reviews

Web of Deceit

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The story is set starting two years after a mysterious and savage attack on the family of attorney Jennifer March, in which her mother was killed, her brother incapacitated, and her father dissapeared. Two years after the attack, her father's body is discovered in a glacier in the Alps. The story centers around March attempting to discover the reasons behind her father's death, and indeed, behind the savage attack on her family. The story contains all the elements of a good thriller: intrigue, deception, historical roots; and the plot plays out in some very topical locations in the United States and central Europe. There is a healthy dose of the New York Police Department and CIA, and some action packed sequences, most notably, in and out of the narrow railroad tunnels that run through the Swiss Alps. It is a good thriller, and is certainly an enjoyable way to spend a few hours. However, I have been spoilt by Glenn Meade's previous four novels, Brandenburg, Snow Wolf, The Sands of Sakkara, and Resurrection Day. In contrast to those four novels, Web of Deceit fell way short of the mark. I was rather dissapointed, in fact. The characters are badly developed. They are shallow and uninteresting, and you cannot really feel anything for them. The novel requires considerable suspension of reality at times. A serving officer of the NYPD certainly does not have the authority to spontaneously run off, effectively chasing his girlfriend on international adventures, without approval of his superiors, which he certainly would not have got. He would have been better worked into the plot as a CIA agent. Something that Meade has considerable experience writing about. The novel goes to some fascinating and very scenic parts of the world, but none of these places were particularly well described. I have visited all of the locations mentioned in the book, and each time, I found myself thinking, "Wait a minutes, what about...". The story itself is interesting to begin with, but the deception and intrigue, so well handled in Meade's previous work, was so convoluted, it became a commedy after a while. In the end, I found the plot flat and implausible, and I could no longer be surprised at whatever strange twist came next. Some subtlety would have been good. I had the distinct impression that Meade simply didn't know what to do with the story after a while. Or perhaps, he was simply in a rush to finish it. Anyway, one bad hit out of five total is still pretty good odds, and I look forward to his next novel.

When I read Irish writer Glenn Meade's Snow Wolf after its release in the U.S. in 1996, it became one of my all-time favorite international thrillers. In subsequent years I enjoyed, though to a lesser extent, three of his other books: Brandenburg, Sands Of Sakkara and Resurrection Day. When I recently saw, while checking the Amazon-U.K. site, that Meade had written two other books that were not published in the U.S., I ordered them from an Amazon-UK reseller. Upon their arrival, I immediately started Web Of Deceit -- and that's when my anticipated excitement turned into sheer astonishment. That is, after reading over 1,000 books over the years, I was astonished that Web of Deceit turned out to be one of the worst books, if not the worst book, I have ever read. The basic plot concept of Web Of Deceit is a decent one --i.e., NY attorney, Jennifer March, is haunted by the mysterious and savage slaughter of her family on the same night that her father disappeared, never to be seen again. Then two years later, his corpse is discovered frozen into a remote glacier in the Swiss Alps, the victim of a bizarre murder, and Jennifer goes off to Europe to identify the body and to seek answers. However, Meade's execution of this plot is a disaster in so many ways that I don't want to waste your time reading about them in any detail. Suffice it to say, the events that occur are totally implausible and this is the BEST of the WORST of what is bad about the book. What makes Web Of Deceit so bad is that: (1) each and every character is so poorly developed and unbelievable that they are like cartoon characters, and (2) the dialogue that Meade has the characters' speak is so unrealistic and cliche ridden that I often found myself rolling my eyes in disbelief. Aside from my extreme dissatisfaction with Web Of Deceit, what I found most astonishing is what I learned about myself from this reading experience, which is that I must be a real glutton for punishment since I read the book to the very end. Now the question is: do I even bother to read the second of the two books by Meade that I ordered from the UK, or do I throw it, along with Web Of Deceit, in the trash?

I read this book a few years ago, and was thuroughly captivated by the story, the mystery, the chases, and crosses European treck. Written much like a Hitchcock type thriller, this book had me guessing what was going on throughout this great mystery thriller. I don't know why other readers were dissatisfied, except to say, it was unlike Meade's Snow Wolf, and Sands of Sakhara, and were completely from the author's imagination, instead of being based on true stories. He tried to write a great mystery thriller, and for me, he succeeded.