Review: Well Written But Unexceptional Story
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 22, 2014
Ernie Lindsey's "Sledge" depicts a late night confrontation between an ex-cop turned P.I. and the psycho who nearly killed her years earlier, the type of confrontation that could easily provide the climax to a terrific thriller novel. Instead, Lindsey compresses a novel's worth of explanation and back story into a little over twenty pages, and the result is a story that's much less effective than it should be.Five years ago, cop Mary Walker was attacked by a vicious killer wielding a sledge hammer which resulted in a badly broken leg and the end of her police career. The killer, dubbed "Sledge," went on to kill several other cops but was never caught. Now Mary's on a boring late night stakeout seeing if employees are helping themselves to some of the merchandise in a warehouse. Her night gets a lot more interesting when Sledge shows up again, killing yet another cop before setting his sights on Mary to finis her off as well.The confrontation between the two takes up most of the story and it proves to be rather exciting. Lindsey is s skilled writer, and he maps out the cat-and-mouse game between Mary and Sledge quite well, including a somewhat unexpected development towards the end.Unfortunately, this is a story that would have played much better as the conclusion of a longer work. Lindsey has a complicated story to tell here and only a few pages to tell it in, so there's a lot of discussion about what Sledge had done over the years, and, once his identity is revealed, even more discussion about his motivation. None of this discussion will add to a reader's appreciation of the story, since the reader had no idea about Sledge's history with Mary. So, revealing Sledge's identity in a longer work would likely have caused readers to kick themselves for not guessing it or patting themselves on the back if they had guessed, but in this story, it elicits a shrug. If Lindsey had jettisoned the back story and kelp Sledge as a brute force villain like Jason from the Friday the 13th movies, he could have let the conflict between Mary and Sledge play out longer and become considerably more suspenseful.Lindsey apparently wrote "Sledge" to introduce the character of Mary Walker, who appears in some of his other work. As a stand alone short story, "Sledge" is a mildly entertaining diversion with which to pass a few minutes or so, but it has none of the impact of Lindsey's other work that I have read.  Plus, it raises the question of whether it's worth spending money for a story that's only about twenty pages long when there are good novels available on Kindle for the same price (I got the story for free in a promotion so the price wasn't a factor). Based on the quality of the story, I rate it three stars, but if I had to pay, I would deduct a half to a full star. If you have to pay for this one, there's better value available a lot of places on Amazon (including some of Lindsey's other work).