Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Approximate word count: 10-11,000 words. Bonus story:
4-5,000 words
Availability
Click
on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
Smashwords store
Author:
“Tim Kizer
is an author of several novels and numerous short stories in the
suspense/horror and action thriller genres. He loves to travel and lived
several years abroad.”
For more,
visit the author’s website.
Description:
“Leslie has
a suspicion: someone at work is trying to poison her. Can she prove it? No, and
she doesn't care that she can't as she takes the law into her hands.”
Includes a
bonus short story, Hitchhiker, the
first story in the author’s As the
Darkness Falls series, which is described as follows:
“When a
serial killer hitches a ride one sunny day in a beautiful California valley, he
does not suspect that he may have met his match, who is dead set to take
another life. The battle of wits begins and only the most devious mind will
survive.”
Appraisal:
The version
of this ebook I received had two stories. Intoxication,
at just over ten thousand words, is long enough to qualify as a novella, and Hitchhiker, a bonus short story of not quite
five thousand words. In both cases, the basic story was creative. I especially
liked the twist ending of Hitchhiker,
which was very clever.
The problem
I found is both stories needed a lot more polish to rise to their potential.
Part of this is inadequate copy editing and proofing. These stories passed my
threshold for the acceptable number of such issues for a novel, in spite of
being around a quarter the size of a short novel. Additionally, there were many
sentences that read awkwardly and the author fell into the clichéd problem of
telling instead of showing. The worst offense in this regard was a clunky
narrative in Intoxication explaining
what one of the characters had done the night before that didn’t fit with the
flow of the story and was clumsy to read, despite describing a critical plot
twist.
FYI:
Some adult
language.
Format/Typo Issues:
A large
number of copy editing and proofing misses which include missing words, extra
words, and wrong words.
Rating: ** Two stars
No comments:
Post a Comment