Review: Good Stories Marred by Deceptive Marketing
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 1, 2014
Although Paul Levine's The Road to Hell is billed as a short story collection, it's also a promotion designed to interest readers in his other, more expensive works. Many authors on Amazon do this, making a short work available for free or a low price. However, Levine (or whoever wrote his Kindle blurb) is not exactly honest in describing what people will be buying here.As far as the stories go, two of them are excellent, one is very good, and the fourth is merely average. The title of the book is derived from the fact that all four stories have the word "Hell" in their titles, but otherwise they have nothing in common.In The Brave One in Hell, a 13-year-old Mexican boy trying to enter the U.S. illegally has an encounter with a couple of border-guarding vigilantes who aim to stop illegal immigrants from entering the country at any cost. It's obviously a serious subject (and the subject of at least one of Levine's novels), but it plays out more like a Disney channel feel good fantasy than either a serious drama or a suspense thriller. The description of the action is good, but the ending is a big letdown.In A Hell of a Crime, a district attorney is at home preparing his closing argument for a big murder case, but he has to put up with a good bit of critiquing from his mother, who isn't so sure the defendant is guilty. This one is highly original with a double twist ending worthy of Alfred Hitchcock that I never saw coming. As soon as I finished the story, I was compelled to reread it to be sure I hadn't missed anything and that Levine had played fair. I hadn't, and he had.Development Hell is a clever comedy in which "Beazle," a Hollywood producer, tries to buy the film rights to The Pit and the Pendulum from Edgar Allan Poe. However, as he explains to Poe, the story isn't very marketable without a whole lot of changes to make it more cinematic. There are several laugh-out-loud moments in this sharp satire.To Hell and Back 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 herself 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.Although I would give the book four stars easily on the basis of the four stories, they actually comprise less than half the advertised 100 pages of the book. The remainder of the book (55% according to my Kindle) consists of lengthy excerpts from Solomon vs. Lord, a novel featuring the title duo, and Mortal Sins, another 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 two novels, I would have gotten the actual books.The blurb on the Amazon web site does call this material "excerpts" but neglects to mention that the excerpts occupy over half the book. It's the equivalent of going to a two hour movie and watching a one-hour 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 short story collection but not less than 50 pages of stories and over 50 pages of filler.Because three out of the four stories here are so good, I gave the book 2 1/2 stars rounded to three. But no matter how good the material is Paul Levine (or his publisher) does his audience a disservice by not being straightforward in describing what's actually in this book.