Review: No suspension of disbelief possible
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 5, 2014
A stranger arrives in town. His name is Charlie Kelly and he's looking for a woman named Kay. Nothing wrong with it so far. The town is Bluff Falls, ND and all we know is that it's in the heart of the North Dakota oil boom. A tawdry industry of strip clubs, prostitution and drug dealing has emerged to service the carnal desires of the oil rig workers. In spite of that, not a single character in the book is an employee of the petroleum industry. Besides Charlie, there are two local cops, Nikki Hamill and Mark Perez, who spend much of their time chatting in a local diner. There is a large methamphetamine manufacturing and sales industry at work in Bluff Falls and they know the name of the man in charge (Damon), but thus far they've been unable to pin him to any crimes. Damon is about as evil as they come. He has one of his gang members executed as a message to the rest of the gang not to be disloyal. He is planning the biggest drug deal of his life--300 kilos of meth--at which point he wants to get out of the game and go to a warm climate without an extradition treaty.The plot weakly stitches these characters together with minimal attempts to develop their personalities beyond age, work history and demographics. Some chapters are devoted to rambling soliloquies in which they expound their opinions, chapters that do nothing to advance the storyline and are pure filler.But my main objection is based on craft issues. A book that promises to entertain ought to have been proofread for spelling, grammar and continuity. Major errors cause the reader to come away not being willing to suspend disbelief about the tale being told. Here are some examples, and not the only ones:"Some faces were still showed flecks of dried dirt and mud...."" 'What's did you say your name is?' Dee Dee asked over the blaring music.""More often, he spoke to women in countries that didn't use his native language and not so often in clubs, but in spite of her career choice, Charlie liked the view, and the girl had small-town-girl charm hidden beneath all that makeup and glitter.""For a trailer, Dee Dee lived pretty well in the double wide, four bedroom, two bathroom model.""Charlie slid forward to the foot of the bed as Dee Dee stomped back and forth between he and the master bathroom."Other reviewers mentioned being surprised by twists. Sorry, the story was utterly predictable. Charlie possesses hand to hand combat skills that enable him to walk up to a man holding a rifle, disarm him and knock him out without a shot being fired. I think that makes him  tougher than Mitch Rapp. So it's no surprise that the two mysterious men wearing shades and driving a Lincoln Town Car just happen to be in league with Charlie, even if Sergeants Perez and Hamill assume they are just out of town rubber neckers who like observing crime scenes. Or that Charlie is able to fatally injure the bad guy and not be attacked by ten armed men, including the South American drug buyers there to score 300 kilos of meth while he stands there and talks to them. The ancient Greeks playwrights had a device called Deus Ex Machina they employed whenever the main character of a play was in a hopeless situation. One of the gods would appear and rescue the hapless hero rather than him finding his own way out of the mess. Charlie's invincibility, combined with the complete ineptitude of the criminals, serves the same purpose. And it's not entertaining.