Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: Thriller
Approximate word count: 140-145,000 words
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Author:
“Robert Ryland is the pen name of Robert
Jacoby. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, has a degree in English
Literature, and resides in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina.
His two books, Electric Highway and
The Little Rock Messenger"
are published as e-books on Kindle. He is a member of several writing groups,
and works regularly with new and published writers.”
For more, visit the author’s blog.
Description:
“Patricia
Manning suspects that her brother's death by drowning is part of a conspiracy
by his energy company employer to keep a fraud from being exposed.
Investigating the case, an L.A. cop begins to confirm Manning's suspicions, and
they join forces to gather evidence against the conspirators.”
Appraisal:
The line “’But
it didn’t stop there,’ she reminded unnecessarily,” from Electric Highway summarizes the biggest problem I had with this
book. In fact, with the exception of one minor plot discrepancy I spotted (saying
only three people had some specific knowledge when it was four people by my
count), it is the only issue I had. But it was a big one. I’ll come back to
this, but first I’ll hit on the positives.
That nature
of thrillers is such that the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief should
probably be stretched with most. The villains or situations are often well outside
our experience or real world situations of which we’re aware. While I hope
nothing like this story has or will happen, the premise is largely built on the
kind of situations that we know have occurred. In an author’s note prior to the
start of the book, Ryland lays out the portions of the book that are true. On
top of the reality, Ryland layers a cast
of characters and a story that, given the environment, maybe could have
happened. Many of the characters, both those on the side of good and those not,
were people with qualities we’ll recognize as true to life and very common.
Even those who stretch credibility, don’t do so nearly as much as a typical
thriller. Ryland’s premise was a good starting point and I enjoyed the overall
story.
However,
there were two issues with the execution. The first was a tendency to describe
much of what happened as a long narrative, possibly too much for some tastes.
I’m not going to say he told when he should have showed, but sometimes it
seemed to lean a little in that direction. This wasn’t an issue for me, but the
other problem, alluded to above, was. There were multiple instances of
summarizing what happened earlier in the book. It was as though he didn’t trust
the reader to put the pieces together without reminders. One example was
mid-book when a detective was reviewing in his head what he knew so far. This
took five long paragraphs with five different critical facts reviewed in
excruciating detail. Five sentences might have been okay, if done well. Even
better would have been to cut this
section out entirely. The detective’s thoughts on what he thought the evidence
thus far indicated were more than enough to remind the reader of the pertinent
facts. If this kind of thing happened once, it would have been too much. But I
saw it again and again. Although the detailed editing functions were handled
well, this book could have stood a review by a good content editor to assist in
tightening up and removing extraneous sections such as this.
Format/Typo Issues:
No
significant issues.
Rating: *** Three stars
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