Review: This One Sinks Due to Deceptive Marketing
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 02 1, 2014
Paul Levine's Sink or Swim is billed as "a short story plus bonus material." it's actually a promotion designed to interest readers in his other, more expensive works. Many authors of Amazon do this, making a short work available for free or a low price. However, Levine (or whoever wrote his Kindle blurb) is very deceptive in portraying just what someone who's going to buy the book will receive.Sink or Swim is a short story that also appears in another Levine short story collection called The Road to Hell. There, it went by the title To Hell and Back. Under either title, the story features Solomon and Lord, the mismatched attorneys who are the protagonists of one of Levine's two main series. Victoria Lord believes in playing by the book (and the law), while Steve Solomon has at best a nodding acquaintance with legal ethics, which he won't let stand in the way of justice. In this story, the pair's client, an elderly business woman who is a Cuban refugee in South Florida, has been swindled out of a lot of money by a fellow refugee who helped manage her books and then helped himself to the business' assets. Solomon has two problems: he can't locate the missing money or prove the man actually stole it. So he agrees to go on a deep sea fishing trip with the con man which soon turns into a deadly cat-and-mouse game. Readers won't learn much about Solomon and Lord as characters here, but the confrontation between lawyers (Lord is also on the boat) and con man is quite dramatic with a couple of unexpected plot twists.Had this story appeared by itself as a Kindle selection, I would have given it 3 1/2 stars, with a caveat that readers have to decide whether a good short story is worth the price asked. However, the story actually comprises less than 20% of the advertised 130 pages of the book. The remainder of the book (82% according to my Kindle) consists of lengthy excerpts from four Solomon and Lord novels, and a fifth novel featuring Levine's other main character Jake Lassiter. I didn't read these excerpts and I don't base this review on them. However, if I wanted to read those five novels, I would have gotten the books instead of reading a couple of chapters here.The blurb on the Amazon web site does call this material "excerpts" but neglects to mention that the excerpts occupy the vast majority of the book. It's the equivalent of going to a three hour movie and watching a 30-minute TV episode and a whole bunch of trailers. In my view, this is deceptive, especially if the author charges for the book (I did get my copy for free but I believe it has been offered for sale at various times). People may be willing to spend money for a 100+ page novella but not a 20-page story with over 100 pages of filler. Further, by giving the book's only complete work, the short story formerly called To Hell and Back, a new name, readers who already read the story in another collection might think they were getting something new here.To be fair, I don't know whether this marketing strategy was Levine's idea or his publisher's. However, no matter whose idea it is Paul Levine (or his publisher) does his audience a disservice by not being straightforward in describing what's actually in this book. In this case, my recommendation would be not to pay one cent for this book that has not one single page of new material. If you are interested in the story, read Levine's other collection (which itself is somewhat deceptively described) which, if you have to pay some money, at least gives you four stories with a bunch of filler instead of one rehash with even more filler.