Review: A middle chapter in a formula thriller
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 18, 2014
This book is the length of a short story, but has the characters and plot elements of a novel. It starts and ends in the middle of a sea battle that is never explained or resolved. The title appears to have been chosen randomly, no devil, nothing due, no NSA, no cards and the only deck is the deck of the boat.The entire book consists of three consecutive action scenes: protagonist attacking fishing boats, protagonist and girlfriend swimming for their lives, protagonist providing emergency medical aid to girlfriend and Navy SEALs. None of these work because the author is concerned only with love lives, drinking, military and medical hardware, specifications and characters who either disappear without explanation or never appear in the first place. There are no words to spare for coherent descriptions of place or action, and even if there were, the overhead would slow things down too much to keep the story exciting.In the middle of a longer book, the author could move the explanation and backstory to other chapters, and fill in the necessary information to make these scenes intelligible. He could explain what's going on and resolve things. The result might be a decent thriller, or not. But what we have here is not even a readable fragment of that.