Review: A Betrayal in More than Just the Title
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 24, 2014
"Beyond Betrayal" cost me only 99 cents to purchase through Amazon and that was about 67 cents more than it was worth. Avoid it at all costs.Clarissa Abbott, the heroine, is a deep cover agent working under a non-civil-service contract with an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency. She has infiltrated a terrorist group in London, but is pulled off the assignment without explanation and called back to participate in a top secret mission in Washington D.C.Once she arrives, she is cast into a nest of disgruntled bureaucrats who seem bitter, ambitious and utterly untrustworthy. She is given conflicting information about who she is supposed to be working for and what she is supposed to be doing.She suspects she has been injected into this situation so she can be quietly slain or used as the scapegoat in a murderous conspiracy.Abbott remains a cypher throughout the book. There are hints that she has a tragic past, but Ryan is too lazy, arrogant or indifferent to his readers to tell them about it.All we know about Clarissa is that she spends most of the book fretting about her situation and passively observing what other characters do.The novel is almost completely bereft of thrills, even though it is supposed to be a thriller.Readers turn more than a third of the novel’s pages before anything actually of substance happens: an attempt to assassinate the vice-president of the United States. And when that attempt finally occurs, no explanation that makes any sense is ever offered for it. It is simply a plot mechanism that moves the story from a seemingly endless holding pattern to a chase sequence ending in a bloody gun battle at Boston’s Logan Airport.If the reader is hoping the final firefight will provide some sort of catharsis, or at least an explanation of what has gone before, he or she is going to be disappointed:"As the officers pulled Clarissa to her feet, she caught one last glimpse of [the main villain]. A single thought ran through her mind: why? Why had he done this? No one benefitted from it. Not even him. Or did he? She doubted she'd ever find out."This is absolutely the worst type of story-telling -- forcing readers to wade through 240-plus pages of dull prose just to be told they can try to figure what it all means out for themselves because even the main character doesn't know.Ryan pads his novel with endless descriptive passages delivered in a tersely Hemingwayesque prose style. These passages fail to move the story forward even a millimeter but fill so many pages you would swear he was being paid by the word. An example:“The guy took a step forward. A couple walking along the outer edges of the corridor took two steps in. The man nodded, flashed a smile and merged into the line. He was three paces in front of [Clarissa]. She glanced down at his shoes. They looked expensive. The soles were hard and thick. The uppers made from leather.  A lot of the guys paid for custom shoes, she’d heard. They wanted comfort, the ability to kick ass and to look good.”Honest, folks. I am not making this stuff up. It’s really that bad.When the going gets tough, Clarissa dissolves in hysterical tears and completely loses her ability to concentrate on anything but saving her own life. She drops her gun in the middle of one firefight and has to recover it from a cook in a restaurant kitchen.She fails to display even the most rudimentary skill at unarmed combat and remains under the physical control of her opponents throughout the novel. And even though she suspects everyone is plotting against her, she continues to readily offer them her trust and let them order her around like an intern in a corporate mailroom.The only thing Beyond Betrayal has right is its title: this novel betrays its readers in so many ways that nobody but a masochist would buy it.