Thursday, January 12, 2012

Push this one back down!!!

I used to love reading Tami Hoag... but I have found that the I was losing that loving feeling with some of more recent reads. I wonder if it is me that has changed, the writing style that has changed, or if the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

I sometimes wonder if how my literary tastes have evolved over time, has something to do with the length of time since I have been in university. I seemed to really love truly escapist literature there for a few years, and now, I am really craving a much more intellectual kind of satisfaction from the books that I read. At least, for my escapist novels, I just want something different than what I got out of this book.

The start was promising, interesting precept, but then this book just went off of the rails for me. There have been quite a few popular books that I have read in the last year that have tried to do too many things in the span of 350 some pages. This is where I can't help but think that I have done more of the changing over time, I want a good bang for my buck and a scattered story that tries to be a love story, and then more or less reveals a killer part-way through, but then adds another random body and potential murderer, and then other linked violent acts, and ends up like a Hollywood Summer Blockbuster movie where things explode and people are running around everywhere! Okay, that isn't really how this book unraveled, but this is how it felt. I finished this because it was an easy read, but I will happily sell it back to a used book store rather than pay if forward to someone else. Give me a character driven mystery any day. Maybe that is truly it - after so many good suspense novels that aren't all about unrealistic plotlines, where characters evolve, and stories take place over "months", this just didn't ring true or do it for me.

Next!

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