Review: Cool idea...a bit rambling
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 16, 2013
Zack Fortune is a successful lawyer.  He's well off and handsome to the point where people seem to go out of their way to please him...despite how badly he treats people.  He has a habit of being selfish, leaving a wake of broken relationships behind him.  Even his 'friends' don't know why they're friends with him but for some reason, they just can't keep away  no matter how badly he treats them.  On a whim, he agrees to endure a past life regression courtesy of his best friend Sam's wife Clarissa...that's when things get interesting for Zack.  He begins to see people die in front of his eyes.  Suicides, accidents, people jumping from buildings, everywhere.  The thing is, he's the only one who can see them.  Is Zack going crazy or did he bring something back from another life that's come back to haunt him?I'll come right out and say it:  this book was odd.  I had a hard time liking Zack.  Everything came so easily to him, no matter how much he stomped on people during the course of his daily life.  At the outset, it was tiring to hear about how handsome he is and how people would bend over backwards to please him, even though he'd been stabbing them in the back for his own reasons since he was a kid.  Of course, there is a REASON for this but it didn't endear me to the character any more.  Zack is a jerk, plain and simple.  I didn't 'hate' him but I didn't 'like' him either.  I didn't even hate to like him or like to hate him.  He's just there to me.  The other characters are more likeable, even if they're all head over heels for the super good looking Zack.  Sam, his friend since college and an odd looking guy that Zack would normally have nothing to do with, along with his wife Clarissa, who is enamored with Mr. Fortune as well, are in many of the scenes.  Usually to tell him what a jerk he's been, but they're still there.  There is of course, another in a long line of girlfriends, Susan, who Zack dumps.  To say she doesn't take it very well is an understatement.  Then there's Jason, a troubled late-teenager that doesn't want to leave Zack alone.  These ancillary characters are well fleshed out but their blind devotion to Zack, even though all is explained, gets a bit old in short order.Insofar as the story.  It's long and has a tendency to ramble.  There are a few reveals that were fair (no fast ones pulled here) but they were telegraphed.  Which is ok, but there's no 'wow' moment as it becomes clear what's happening.  I think one of the things that I'd like to have seen more of would be these deaths that Zack is alone privy to.  Because of the rambling nature of the book, these events are few and far between.On a technical side, the book had some of the oddest punctuation I've ever encountered in any book I've ever read, not to mention consistently abrupt point of view changes from paragraph to paragraph.  I don't mean to bash the author, but it's an issue with me when I'm not sure whose head I'm in when going from paragraph to paragraph with nothing so much as a page break.The book does pick up by the latter third and there are some good moments here.  It's not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination.  There were just a few things I wished were different both from a story perspective as well as a technical aspect, thus it gets a solid 3.