Review: Purple Prose
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 03 14, 2014
I'm surprised this book didn't start out "It was a dark and stormy night."Mild spoilers ahead:  The story takes place in India, 1894. The hero is an American, Jack Wilde, who is somehow connected to the military.Good heavens, where to begin... First of all, it is apparent that the author has no grasp of the "show, don't tell" rule of good authorship.  However, I could forgive that, if the writing was compelling.  But, it's not. Example: "What a strange place was India, and what bizarre circumstances had thrown him up on her exotic shores."  The mental image generated by this passage was that of man being heaved onto a beach by a vomiting ocean, which is probably not what the author had in mind.But maybe I could forgive that if the dialog was good. It's not. Instead, let's call it... imaginative.  Example: The hero and an Indian policeman are hunting a killer in the dark hold of a drifting ship. Another man with them has just been shot in the head by the killer. The policeman turns to the hero and says, "The treacherous viper has just reared his most vile head for a look around. Perhaps now you might kill this disgusting serpent."  Gosh, I'm sure that's just exactly how men who know that they could get shot in the head at any second might communicate. I'm thinking that hand signals might work out better for them in the long run.A few pages later, the hero says to the policeman, "Well, Manjeet, you've been a damned good comrade as we prowled through the belly of this beast. Do you care to accompany me me further and poke around in her bowels?"  Ewww....You get the idea.  All the dialog is like that.The author starts out with a tense and potentially exciting scene, and then chops it up with segues that take us away from the action. Finally, when we get back on track to the manhunt, we find that (along with the bad guys) there is a mutant tiger loose in the hold of the ship (the hold described as "a yawning pit of hell"), the biggest tiger than anyone has ever seen ("big as a whale"), with three front legs.  A mutant tiger.  Yep.And that was only 9% into the book.I couldn't go any further, and deleted this book from my Kindle. Thank heavens it was free.