Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Deathtrap / Dana Marton


Reviewed by: Keith Nixon

Genre: Romance / Thriller

Approximate word count: 65-70,000 words

Availability    
Kindle  US: YES  UK: YES  Nook: YES  Smashwords: YES  Paper: YES
Click on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords store

Author:

Dana Marton wrote four books over thirteen years before being published. Her novels have been translated into seven languages and available in eleven countries.

To learn more about the author you can visit her website.

Description:

Sophie Curtis is recovering from a heart transplant. Strange events keep happening to her. As a result police chief Ethan Bing comes into her world. He’s emotionally damaged after his wife was murdered two years ago. The case remains unsolved.

Another murder occurs, with some similarities to the death of Bing’s wife. As Ethan starts to investigate he finds himself getting closer to Sophie.

Appraisal:

I have to admit, I made an error when choosing this book to review. I thought I was picking up a thriller novel, however very quickly I thought, ‘This is a romance first and foremost, it just happens to be wrapped around a crime.’ So, I’m not really the ideal target audience for this story.

That being said I wasn’t particularly convinced by the crime / thriller element. It felt like a convenient wagon to hitch the romance onto. The opening pages, where Bing investigates the first murder, felt somewhat contrived and forced. The criminal elements and even the solving of the crime itself were at times too convenient.

Twice friends of Ethan are introduced via a phone call. Both are incredibly unrealistic – one was tortured for three days by a serial killer and then buried alive (he survived). The other was a guy who’d hooked up with a woman in an FBI witness protection programme that went wrong. They simply pop up for a few paragraphs, then are gone. Perhaps they’re characters from past or future books, but it wasn’t clear and it jarred.

The flow of the book was intermittent stages of developing romance between Ethan and Sophie (which I got fed up on, but again, I’m not the right target audience) and then another step forward in the investigation and so on. It’s a very gentle story for one that includes murder and adultery. Sophie several times says ‘Dang darn it’ when something goes wrong. Very polite. By the way, this is an observation, not a criticism.

So, not my type of book but I didn’t think it was particularly well put together. But I’m sure there will be many people that will find it very enjoyable, so what do I know?

FYI:

Nothing.

Format/Typo Issues:

None.


Rating: *** Three Stars

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