Review: I won’t be actively hunting more books in this series.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 14, 2013
This is the second Jake Lassiter book I’ve read, the fourth in the series after reading Fool Me Twice, the sixth. I liked that book enough that I wanted to read more in the series. Not anymore.The story itself is good. Nicky Florio hires Jake, his wife’s lover, to defend him against a civil suit filed by the widow of an environmental activist who dies during a party at Nicky’s mansion. Jake discovers the sleazy developer has plans to exploit the Everglades for personal gain and knocks those plans awry, earning him Nicky’s hatred.Not much happens through the first half of this book. Jake goes to court, Jake sleeps with women, Jake talks to people. And he comes across as a clueless jerk easily manipulated by those around him. Then in the last 40% of the book, Jake wakes up, grows a spine, and starts to act like the main character we expect in our books.Jake’s two muses are his Granny Lassiter and retired ME Charlie Riggs. Both are caricatures, not ‘real’ people. Riggs constantly spouts maxims in Latin and tells us the scientific name of every animal he and Jake encounter. It was cute at first but got tiring very fast. Granny Lassiter is a broadly drawn woman who drinks home-brewed moonshine, smokes two packs of cigarettes every day, and insults Jake regularly.On the plus side, this e-book wasn’t loaded with the errors that plagued Fool Me Twice.