Having been a long-time fan of the hard boiled detective novel, especially those that inspired the great film noirs such as the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, I feel like I can say with some surety that whoever Gary Troup actually is, he is not anywhere close to the greats. The author's writing vacillates between a poor attempt at emulating his predecessors and overly poetic language that in context seems out of place. He can't have his cake and eat it too. What's worse is that this writer suffers from the traditional amatuer mistake - he wants to tell us what his book means, so he inserts this professor character who is happy to provide a literary context that explains exactly what it is the writer is trying to do with his story. I cannot stand this. It's a petty attempt to control the way that readers interpret the novel. As my creative writing professor taught me, instead of saying what they're doing, the best authors just do it. Gary Troup does not.
I bought the book because of Lost, of which I am a huge fan, and I have to say that whoever this writer is, he got really lucky with this break because he's acheieved a kind of instant celebrity status that'll probably last him even after his actual identity is revealed. Had this been his debut novel absent the product placement, I doubt that it would have sold much at all. For the Lost fans, honestly, the book is not worth the read - it gives very minimal additional information, and you could probably find a one-page synopsis of everything you learn in Bad Twin about Lost on an internet page (mostly there are small tidbits here and there regarding the Hanso Foundation). There has been speculation that Gary Troup is actually Stephen King - I highly doubt it. Not only is King a much better writer than this guy, but the writing style is totally different. With King, there's an abundance of swearing which is very noticeable. Not true here.
Bottom line - this is a bad novel. It gets two stars for at least carrying a plot line and not having obvious typos or grammatical mistakes. It was easy reading, but not really all that pleasurable. I finished it because I had to know if there was anything Lost-related hidden in the pages (which there really wasn't), but absent that, I feel like I could've put the book down at any time, even with only 10 pages to go (Sawyer!), and would've been perfectly content never knowing how it ended.
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