Review: No Stars Would Be My Choice
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 04 16, 2013
This book got a lot of 4 and 5 star reviews and that baffles me. I read the first book and was 'meh', but not awful and I got the 2nd book thinking that writers often improve. Wrong. The main characters, Manny and Sophie, both married, spend the entire book lusting after other people. Their constant sexual innuendos/references throughout are pathetic and repellent. I knew early on (spoiler alert), that something would happen that would allow Manny to follow his lust in the next book, and it did). All of the characters are superficial and uninteresting unless you are 12 years old and have never read a book before. The writing is lazy and unimaginative. It takes a fair talent to add humour to a book about a vicious serial killer. That talent was not to be found in this book. The jokes were grade school level and not funny at all. I finished it simply so that I could write this review and hopefully save others from wasting their time.Here's my take. This author read Silence of the Lambs and tried to create his own Hannibal Lecter, unsuccessfully. Then, I figured, he watched the TV series Criminal Minds (which I've watched twice) and/or NCIS and created "Buzzy", the brilliant tech who shows no brilliance but she does dress funny and wears lots of make up and jewelry, so she's sort of like Abbey in NCIS, no?. No. Buzzy comes across as idiotic rather than eccentric. Who knows what show(s) inspired the Manny and Sophie characters, but they're not original and are as shallow as puddles. While I skipped whole paragraphs after I was half way through, I kept thinking that the guy was writing a TV show that he had seen. Sure enough, close to the end, a reference is made to Criminal Minds and Bones, and I thought "Ha!". The ending is as bad as everything else about the book. If only Fava Beans and a nice Chianti were mentioned. Give this one a pass, even if you have nothing else to read but the back of a cereal box.