Review: Cliche Heaven
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 08 27, 2012
Cliché Yep this book is a collection of clichés.  I have to agree with most of he one and two star reviews given previously to this book.  The clichés are not so much vampiric as private detective/spy clichés. And I mean every one. Including the ones that contradict each other.Hero is a 130-year-old vampire but seems to have the mental age of about 23.  He is almost irresistible to women when he turns on the vamp magnetic effect.  However, confronted either of the two by the female protagonists he acts and talks like a 20 something geeky kid.He works for a seemingly incompetent and ambivalent controller and governing body.  Weird arguments with these parties and other characters where the hero ends up holding the shitty end of the stick every time and accepts his lot with a "Oh man this always happened to me." And then pages of maudlin introspection for example; Hero wants villain vamp to be targeted.  After resistance and inaction the vamp council agree and gives him the job.  He then says this is bad as this guy is hard to take.  So they offer him extra crew to help.  He turns it down because.....wait for it"...........grand cliché ...ta da.............cue music.... HE ALWAYS WORKS ALONE!!!!!  So they say fine get on with it.  Then he is sad about being under appreciated and used because he has to take on super vamp on his own?????????????? .  (Which I am sure is what he wanted, no demanded.)  Then enter many pages of the maudlin introspection.Puke. This is only one of the many classic detective assassin clichés that you get bombarded with.  Are you getting sick of me using the word cliché yet?  Well you should be and you will be getting the idea about the book.  The clichés are mixed in with these ridiculous circular arguments and also amazing (read ridiculous) insights to the detective and assassin role and equally amazing insights from his mentor the great Zero  "Didn't I tell you hotel rooms are often traps?"His control is useless being disinterested and lazy and just plain dumb.  Okay the controls are ex agents given the role due to their good service.  So how did this one get through the years of agent training and then live and succeed through hundreds of years of being an agent and then end up fat dumb and happy?  After hero gets his but handed to him for the second time he is convalescing in hospital.  Control visits him.  Hero asks for a bodyguard while he recovers.  Control thinks it is not necessary!!!!!  Then comes one of those whiney circular arguments.  Explaining anything to control is like teaching algebra to a dog.  Also Hero also isn't good at explaining being a maudlin cliché  factory.The author seems to have meticulously researched theses insights of the detective assassin genre by watching movies and reading crap novels of the genre have.  In fact I think this book is a classic Mickey Malone detective novel from the 1940s with a vampire element thrown in, but not as good.His amazing detective ability leads him to stake out a city nightclub because, well nightclubs are super vamps usual hunting grounds.  There are probably a hundred nightclubs in the city but he guesses right first time and that very night the bad boy turns up.  Man what are the odds?  I mean couldn't the author have even a simple device like a tip off?  Nope.  Just go to one and the bad boy strolls right in. Lazy.He has trained for years and has 30 years actual "fixer" experience yet his fantastic skills seem to be in the leaping in the air while wielding a weapon (loosely wielding because they usually get taken off him early in the fight) variety rather than in locating and eliminating the target variety. To locate the target in his world you just seem to go somewhere on a hunch and wait about 5 minutes and target will appear.  Of course he then has no workable plan so everything comes down to a chasing around jumping in windows while the super vamp makes taunts about taking over the world.Then he meets a beautiful female ex KGB assassin.  The clichés here are hip deep.  She is beautiful and has been trained in everything by everyone.  She has worked in every cold war battleground as an assassin.  During the Soviet Afghan war she took out a 14-man Afghan guerrilla team that the Soviet Army could not catch one by one.  Man! Teenage wet dream. Again her training also leads her to use the same hopeless strategy the hero does.  Man that KGB assassin training must have sucked.  No wonder they lost the cold war.This book was a bunch of clichés put in a box and shaken up.Enough!!!!!!!!!  Get the sample before you buy