Review: I found one of the main guys a little hard to like, but the book has a great action/mystery plot
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 6, 2010
Warning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS.Rating: 8/10PROS:- I found the plot interested and well-paced. The mystery is...mysterious (at least, *I* didn't guess the murderer's identity before it was revealed, although I'm admittedly not a great mystery solver), and the story incorporates a lot of different witnesses presenting differing views on the case and widely disparate opinions about the other people involved--all of which Elliot and Tucker have to sift through to discover the truth.- The characters are interesting while at the same time seeming like real people. None of them have the "perfect" feel of fictional characters; Elliot and Tucker both act like real men with believable insecurities and fairly quick tempers. I also like that there's no power inequality in their relationship: they're equally strong and intelligent.- Lanyon does an excellent job of reinforcing character traits, especially those that reveal something about the character's past. There's a little indication nearly every page early on in the story that Elliot's current life as a professor is quite different from his former life working for the FBI.- I used to teach college English, and Elliot strikes me as a true-to-life depiction of a college professor. He's intelligent and a little careless, he interacts with his students as though he's equal parts amused and frightened by them, and he thinks of them by first and last name, often inverted ("Mrachek, Leslie"). The story also contains a large number of caustic remarks about the arrogance of people who work in academia (example: "Only in academia did people talk such [b.s.] and expect to be taken seriously"). Not all academics are that way, of course--Elliot isn't; otherwise his observations wouldn't be funny--but the comments are largely true and made me laugh out loud more than once.CON:- The entire story is told in third person limited from Elliot's perspective. This isn't inherently a bad thing; this was just one of those stories that I really wanted to see from both main characters' points of view. Elliot has some pretty painful memories of Tucker, and I wanted to see Tucker's defense of himself. The main reason I wanted to see Tucker's perspective on their history together is that so many of their early encounters in this story are bitter and tight-lipped and angry. I could see Elliot's desire for something more to develop once again, but all I ever saw from Tucker was his outward terseness, so I started thinking of him as kind of a jerk. Tucker's redemptive moment, for me, didn't come until three-quarters of the way through the book.Overall comments: The plot, as opposed to the relationship, is certainly central here. But it's a good plot. I wasn't QUITE on the edge of my seat biting my fingernails the whole time, but I never lost interest, never wanted to put the book down. The investigation plot and the romance are also well tied together. It didn't feel to me as though either one was tacked on to the story as an afterthought.