Reviewed by: Keith Nixon
Genre: Thriller
Approximate word count: 60-65,000
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Author:
DJ Swykert
is a former 911 operator and wolf expert. He lives in Northern Kentucky. His
works of short fiction and poetry have been published in a number of magazines.
DJ also
writes novels – Maggie Elizabeth
Harrington won a literary competition and was followed by Children of the Enemy and Alpha Wolves.
You can
read more about DJ Swykert on his website.
Description:
Jude St.
Onge is a drug addict who thinks he’s onto the deal of his life when he steals
a bag of drugs from heavyweight dealer, Mitchell Parson. But whilst fleeing
Jude’s car breaks down. By chance he seeks refuge with Ray Little, a brooding
junkyard owner and ex-con.
Parson’s
fixer, a brutal Haitian called Swallow, is sent out by Parson to track Jude
down. Swallow tortures and then kills Jude’s wife, Ariana. He kidnaps Jude’s
daughter, Angelina, who was forced to watch her mother’s hard death, so he can
use her as leverage to ensure Jude returns the drugs.
Swallow’s plan
works, but not everything goes right for Jude. Ray swears he will rescue
Angelina and, with the help of story hungry local reporter Ted Rogers, he goes
about the task in single minded and lethal fashion.
Appraisal:
If I was
going to describe this book with one word it would be ‘argh!’ If I was allowed
a second it would be ‘yuck’.
To
elaborate a little, I found this book by turns frustrating and overtly graphic.
First, the frustration. Children of the
Enemy started out well enough, with a strung out Jude losing control of his
car and coming across the complicated and enigmatic Ray in his moment of need. However,
the story soon slowly went off the rails and by the latter quarter I’d had
enough, primarily due to the writing style where dialogue and sometimes
description was repetitive, meandering and unrealistic. For example:
“I want to
do what’s right, Ray. But I don’t want to do something I’ll regret later.”
“The way I
see it we either regret doing something or we regret doing nothing. Either way
we end up living with regret. I’d rather regret what I did than regret what I
didn’t.”
And on
occasion the characters kept going over the same ground, for example (in a
much, much shortened outline):
“Is he
gonna make it?” McCants asked.
“…He must
have one of the hardest heads on earth to still be alive. He shouldn’t be
alive, but he is, and most likely he’s gonna survive…” Dr Litton said.
“Then you
think he’s gonna recover…?”
And
sometimes just downright clunky:
“I think
all rich people are crazy. They do crazy shit and they get into crazy shit.
What you have going on here is rich people crazy shit…” And so on.
Maybe it’s
just me not taking to the author’s style, but after wading through what must have
been in excess of one hundred of these types of lines I tired of it.
The second
element was the graphic description of torture, drug use and sex on which I
will barely dwell. I’m not the squeamish sort, but personally having to read
about a fourteen year old girl having her finger chopped off was just too much.
And that was by no means the end of it…
FYI:
Graphic
torture scene, liberal violence and murder, drug use and strong language. Not
for the faint hearted.
Format/Typo Issues:
A few typos
and format errors.
Rating: ** Two stars
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