Review: Amateurish
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 12, 2012
The story of who murdered liquor store owner, Manny, and now threatens the life of high school teacher, Jessie Jones, could have been an interesting tale in the hands of a capable author.  Unfortunately, what we have here is an inane full length book that should have been a short story at best.  It is 5% story and 95% filler fluff.I keep asking myself WHEN novice story writers will cop to the fact that page after page of painful inner dialogue by the main (or any) character is a sure fire way to make any book a big fat zero.This 'book' is all over the place.  The author would have done well to sit down prior to writing and compose an outline as to what the main theme of the book would be and then FOLLOW that outline.  There is so much ridiculous, extraneous activity going on that it is close to impossible to follow what I took to be the main point of the book: the murder of Manny and the protagonist's unwilling involvement in the crime.In one scene you have some silly mishmash about an upcoming wedding, in several others you have Jessie doing battle with the big 'meanies' in her life...characters, by the way, who are so one dimensional as to be laughable.  In other scenes she is agonizing over a long dead romance (ten years) when her erstwhile lover turns out to be lead investigator on the murder at hand.These characters insult the reader's intelligence mercilessly.  Are we really supposed to believe that Jessie, after narrowly escaping death and then having her house torched, lists wearing a hideous maid of honor dress in her sister's wedding as one of her top three current concerns?  Give me a break.Another idiotic character is that of Jessie's mother.  This is a woman who supposedly made her way through medical school and became a respected surgeon while at the same time raising two children and yet whose main focus is getting her daughters married off.  The mindset just doesn't jibe.I find myself skipping page after page after page of imbecilic tripe just to get to the next coherent passage that might just relate to the mystery at hand.I'm afraid that whomever murdered Manny will have to remain a mystery to me because I've lost all patience with this miserable excuse for a book.