Customer Reviews

Web of Evil (Charnwood)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

In this second Ali Reynolds book, she is finally getting her divorce from the philandering husband she refers to as Fang. She drives from Arizona to California only to find that her soon to-be-ex missed the meeting. He couldn't quite make because he was murdered the night before by being stuffed into a trunk of a car and left of the railroad track. You can imagine what happened. Ali is the prime suspect since she was alone on her drive which actually passed the crime scene, and since the murder occurred before the divorce, she inherits everything despite the pregnant fiancee in the picture. Ali's mother and police detective friend come to California to help her out of the mess.

I am a big JA Jance fan from the acclaimed Joanna Brady series to the grittier Beaumont series. Both of those series with their corresponding characters are highly anticipated by me. I did read the previous Ali Reynolds novel and while the story was not as good as the other series', I did like the cast of primary characters. I'm not sure what happened in this book. Again, I was really looking forward to reading this novel, but a few chapters in, I was wondering if I was actually reading a JA Jance book. I still liked Ali as a character, but that whole blog gimmick is not needed. I started skipping the blogs and the comments. I know this is a new era of technology and everyone and their mother has a blog, but don't use one in book. Boring. The story itself was totally ludicrous and ridiculous. It reminded me more of a Evanovich Stephanie Plum Novel than a JA Jance novel. Maybe that was the point since for some ungodly reason the Stephanie Plum novels are popular, but if it was, then JA took a wrong turn. Tripe maybe be popular, but it doesn't mean it's good. Bring back Joanna and Beau or write a traditional mystery for Ali. She deserves better.

Last comment--I think it is unacceptable when a book goes to press with blatant errors. Several times the character of Tracy was referred to as Terry, and the character of Jake was referred to as Jack.

Ali Reynolds has to be the stupidist heroine ever created for a series. I thought Stephanie Plum was too stupid to tie her shoe laces but Ali Reynolds is too stupid to put the shoes on! She does everything she's been told not to do, goes against advice from far smarter people, and just ignors plain common sense with a self rightous attitude that no one is going to tell her what to do or not to do. Then she has the unmitigated gaul to play the "poor me" card when she gets in over her head - again and again and again.....And the writing was so awful I couldn't believe J. A. Jance wrote this book. The same inane information is repeated over and over as if either Jance forgot she had already told us, couldn't think af anything new to say, or thought her audience was as stupid as her character. I love the books with Sheriff Brady and Beaumont but will never force myself to read any more with Reynolds as the main character. Life's too short to read garbage.

Web of Evil opens from the point of view of a man bound hand and foot in the trunk of a car. What a promising start. Unfortunately, the heroine, the much maltreated Ali Reynolds, makes her entrance in the next chapter. Ali is one of those characters who is annoyingly perfect. All of the others in this cast also are "types" - parents with hearts of gold, mindless bimbos, hapless illegal immigrants, cops with the hearts of lions, avaricious lawyers. Much of the action is moved along via the device of Ali's blog, Cutloose, in which she whines about losing her news anchorwoman position (too old), maligns her cheating, media exec husband, and ignores advice to avoid blogging about all the danger she blindly stumbles into after that husband disappears. Naturally, her blog is wildly popular, and Ali now seems to spend her life answering email from her legion of admiring fans. I guess this book qualifies as a mystery, since I had no idea who committed the murders or why. But it's certainly not a thriller, nor is there a glimmer of suspense.

This is the second novel to feature Jance's character Alison Reynolds. This time out, the character is ready to finalize her divorce from her cheating husband, settle the lawsuit with the network that fired her because of her age, and get on with her life as a blogger in the networking community. So she travels to LA to tie up all the loose ends.

Before the divorce can be finalized, Ali's husband is killed. She becomes a suspect. His bride -to-be, 9 months pregnant and counting, is left without husband, home, or financial means to support herself and her unborn baby. In short order we have another death, a kidnapping, another death, another kidnapping, and more deaths.

There is plenty of action, what with one dead person after another turning up around Ali. She is aided by her mother, son, father, and good friend, cop/Marine Dave, from back home in Sedona, Arizona. She is a suspect in at least two homicides and still the cops let her keep her glock.

This book disturbed me in the number of deaths that occurred, the way Ali responded to each one, and the supposed ineptitude of the LAPD, are they really that incompetent???

Ali seems to be a shallow character. There are times when she is making arrangements to care for the unborn child of her husband, and when she tries to help her long-time gardener get his job back, but I can't feel the love. Its as though she is doing these things because the writer says she should, not for what is in her heart. In other words, she does not appear to be empathetic or sympathetic, just a two-dimensional character in a book.

As for all the car chases, and midnight runs up and down the highways, this is more fiction than I care for. Let's at least have some semblance of reality in our novels. I know that this is all fiction, but couldn't Jance at least give the impression that her characters are based on real people??

I'm currently on Chapter 9, but I've realize from Chapter 3 or 4 that Ali is one of the DUMBEST characters in the world. Can someone please create an accused person with some COMMON SENSE? This woman just doesn't listen. How many murders do you have to be accused of to make you wake up?

The character Ali is an idiot. I can't feel sorry for her when she won't even help herself. This started out good, but boy is this (or she) stupid. Women do have brains, so why wouldn't the author write a character with intelligence? Totally disappointed.

Former television reporter and now professional blogger Ali Reynolds drives her Porsche Cayenne to Los Angeles to complete her divorce--so her husband can marry the following day. Because of her husband's need to marry quickly (his fiancee is extremely pregnant), he's agreed to give Ali just about everything she can ask for. When he doesn't show up for the divorce, his body is found to be an apparent murder victim, and his will has not been updated, leaving everything to Ali, Ali becomes a murder suspect. Against the advice of her attorney, though, Ali continues to blog.

Ali's plight grows worse when she has an argument with the mother of her husband's fiancee--and the older woman promptly ends up dead. Could Ali really be a 'black widow' as a competitive blogger complains? And could the sexy cop from out of town be her ally in murder? If Ali doesn't want to be railroaded toward a lethal injection, she needs to take charge of her own investigation--along with help from her mother and sexy cop Dave.

Author J. A. Jance's skills as a writer nearly manage to obscure the story defects in this mystery. Fundamentally, Ali is just not a likable character. She is certain of her righteousness, full of anger at her soon-to-be ex-husband despite his agreement to give her everything she asks for in the divorce, and unwilling to take advice of her high-priced attorney, the cop who obviously has a crush on her and wants to save her, or anyone else around her. Indeed, given the danger she's in, some of her decisions are simply impossible to take seriously (come on, would she really drive out to see Roseanne without telling anyone?).

Jance is a powerful writer and her strong style carries over to WEB OF EVIL, but the unlikable and unidimensional characters ultimately limited my enjoyment of this story. This isn't a horrible book, but it isn't as good as it should be, or as I know Jance's books so often are.

There is something to be said for mindless entertainment. I understand that sometimes people just want to read something that is light and safe and familiar. I often read novels that are unrealistic and enjoy them.

But does any novel really have to be this awful? Mindless entertainment works best when it is light-hearted or filled with suspense or features memorable characters. Web of Evil doesn't have any of these qualities. The novel is virtually humourless, unless you include the embarrassingly bad dialogue. At one point a drug dealer actually says "No matter what, I'm not going back to the slammer!"

The slammer? Does anyone really think a drug dealer talks like that?

What's next........ "You'll never take me alive cop-per!"

The novel sounds like it was written by a naive housewife (which I assume it was). The plot is ridiculous. There is no genuine emotion generated by any of the events in the novel and our protagonist not only lacks the plucky charm of other female leads in this genre, she is actually unlikeable, annoying, and clearly not `the sharpest knife in the drawer'.

This is a terrible novel. There are other options if you are looking for a light mystery / suspense novel to read. Almost anything would be better than this drivel.

I read "Edge of Evil" and thought it pretty dreadful, but thought maybe the next one would be better. Boy, was I wrong. This one is just as bad. Ali Reynolds is your stock beautiful, successful woman doing really stupid things Why did she marry this jerk in the first place? Then by coincidence she drives by the railroad tracks just as he is killed? Oh please..... Then, she has money for everything, no matter how outrageous, and expects complete loyality from everyone. I gave it one star for the one moment in the book where she realizes she may have had something to do with the demise of the marriage. She remembers that her dead husband mentioned he wanted children and she said no way to that. How wonderful for her to recognize that it was not all his fault. It takes two. All in all I found the book tedious and the main character tiresome and the whole situation unbelievable. The early JP Beaumont and Joanna Brady booksw are much better.

I am always amazed at writers who choose to make their lead characters, supposedly intelligent and successful people, into characters who make consistently stupid decisions. Despite the best advice of high-priced lawyers and a proessional policeman, the lead character was written to choose arrogant, wrong-headed, dangerous choices throughout the book. The writer, Nance, must hate women. This lead character was written as a real jerk!

I won't repeat the plot. I've read all of her Joanna Brady series and most of the JP Beaumont series, and I found myself wondering where is J.A. Jance in this book? It's like this book was written by a different author altogether. This book is readable, but just barely, seems to be mostly fluff with little substance.