Reviewed by: Keith Nixon
Genre: Crime / Thriller
Approximate word count: 70-75,000 words
Availability
Click
on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
Smashwords store
Author:
I couldn’t find a bio on
the author. However you can learn more about the book, its setting and themes
at this website.
Description:
John
McDaid’s first day in CID and he steps straight into the middle of a murder
case. A young man has been beaten to death. McDaid and his colleagues quickly
catch the offenders, but they get off on a technicality. And so begins a career
long case for McDaid, from the late 70’s through to the 00’s when he finally
learns all the answers to what really happened that fateful night.
Appraisal:
I really
wanted to like this story, it’s exactly the sort I tend to reach for (as BigAl
said, “It screamed Keith Nixon”). Unfortunately it didn’t quite match up to
expectations, but it did have merit.
As the
description outlines, the plot is the reminiscences of a now retired policeman
as he looks back over a case which stretched back over his career. And the
author does manage this aspect well. McDaid’s voice is that of an old man and
is written as a reflection. Jones also deals satisfactorily with the resultant
large time gaps in the narrative – in some cases years between events – and
builds a warm relationship between McDaid and Francis Hare, the father of the
murdered young man, that the rest of the narrative hangs off. The segments
where McDaid is embroiled in a crime feels convincing.
However,
the timeframe and approach in themselves create issues. There were long stretches
where McDaid undertook two pastimes with Hare – cabinet making and playing football
in a local team together. The former is in particular highly detailed and the
construction of a piece can take page upon page. Both bring McDaid close to
Hare, so it’s worth doing, but the word count to do so is far too high - in
these sections I was seriously considering giving The Cabinetmaker two stars because it switched me off. The
narrative wasn’t being driven along sufficiently and it floundered.
The quality
of Jones’ writing veered between unpractised and excellent. Here’s an example
of the latter:
Barlinnie prison is one of these
places that should have the effect of discouraging criminals from their
profession – the grey imposing exterior is matched inside by a cold drabness
that no amount of modernization and bright paint can cover up.
I really
enjoyed that paragraph. But the narrative is peppered with basic errors in
punctuation, repeated words and an over use of names that undermines the
enjoyment of The Cabinetmaker.
In terms of
punctuation it would be rare to go a page without seeing something. Whether it
was a comma the wrong side of a speech mark, speech marks on lines that weren’t
dialogue or missing full stops, incorrect capitalization (e.g. Rats) and speech
marks that varied between ‘ and “. A desire to underline words to emphasize
them also crept in during the second half of the story.
Repeating
words is quite common in self-published works. It’s something that drives me to
distraction because it’s a basic error that simply isn’t necessary. Heavy use
of names is less seen, but I think the author suffered from a need to tell
rather than show – lots of words used to point out how he or the character was
feeling also crept in. Sometimes the wrong surname was used – O’Hare instead of
Hare, but I didn’t find a spelling mistake.
Here are
some examples:
“That had
been my first day. Naively I had thought that every day would be the same, but
here we were a day later…”
“I enjoyed
chatting with you yesterday, you are a nice guy, aren’t you?”
A couple of
other issues – the book starts in the 1970’s and, other than a Life On Mars angle (for UK readers, yes
one of the characters does drive a Capri) and runs through to the 00’s, however
I got no sense of the time and very little of place. It didn’t help that characters
would drop in and out of Scottish dialect, often across a single page. A
language guide accompanies the novel, but I didn’t need it until the very end.
All of that
being said, on balance I did enjoy the story. It kept me going through to the
end which, given the above, says quite a lot. If the author wielded a knife on
some of the less valuable segments and employed an editor this could be a
pretty decent novel deserving of a higher rating.
FYI:
Plenty of
swearing, with the strongest of words used often.
Format/Typo Issues:
Lots and
lots of them, see above.
Rating: *** Three Stars
No comments:
Post a Comment