Review: So many anachronisms I thot it was a time travel book at first
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 06 29, 2014
Got this free from Bookbub. An abysmal collection of anachronisms, and it's not well written, either. Picture a mashup of:1) a hardboiled 1950s-style detective novel knockoff including the trite, well-worn dialogue and2) a novel set around 1995 - 2000and you know what you need to know about this book.I love period stories -- but this isn't one, unless you're a reader who doesn't care at all about even superficial historical accuracy.Heck, forget accuracy. This is fiction, and I'd be happy to just see basic plausibility.But unless you squeaked through high school social studies and snoozed through your required college history classes, the jarring and ludicrously out-of-time references in this book will kill any interest in the plot.The temporal tone-deafness is incredibly distracting if you know anything about daily life in this period at all. Like, if you've ever heard your parents or (great-) grandparents talk about it, you'll instantly spot inaccuracies and implausibilities.There are so many anachronisms in this book that I honestly believed at first that it was a time travel book and I expected to learn at any moment that the lead character had actually traveled from our current time to the 1920s.But no, this is seriously supposed to be set in 1929. So, for example, this dude and his wife drink margaritas, "go on vacation," think about "renting a little place by the beach so they can go away for the weekend," casually talk about leasing houses, contemplate retiring to foreign countries like Thailand (which was actually called Siam until 1948) and various Pacific islands -- all the trappings of modern society, presumably including air travel to these exotic places that real blue-collar people in 1929 would probably have never even heard of.NONE of this is how society, or daily life, or police departments, or much of anything else worked circa 1929.Don't get me started on the 20+-year-old ship that sails so smoothly you wouldn't know you're underway -- truly a marvel of turn-of-the-century naval architecture, evidently. Oh, and he "retires" from his police "career." Pretty sure it wasn't a "career" in 1929 and I don't think he would have called quitting his job "retirement" back then either. Nor were they handing new retirees a "card and a plant" and blaming it on "budget cuts". And I don't think they were solving "cold cases" then, either.