Review - Magenta Opium by Sharon Baillie

Veronica Dempsey divides her time between disposing of a body and inventing a new form of opium in her loft.

Where to start with Magenta Opium? First, I absolutely hated it. The opening chapter was horribly confusing. My initial view was the author was attempting a Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night Time approach with Veronica – police come knocking at the door and this is explored in an intricate and bizarre fashion. In particular the words ‘door’ and ‘letterbox’ are used incredibly repetitively 24 times in a couple of pages.

Likewise with the door, although able to be a door at standard temperatures and pressures, its door-like qualities are not altogether independent of temperature. At 800 degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit, choose your poison) the door would be a doorway plus mess. At -200 it would be a wall; immovable. This is precisely why the Inuits didn’t invent alloyed metals.

I really struggle with repetition. It can work, like in Catch-22, but the writing has to be skilful. Guess what? It’s not, this is way off the scale.

This repetitive approach is used continuously throughout the book. Routine is used 30 in 144 words as well – there are others. The author also tries a Vernon God Little approach using Veronica’s initials in a (very large) variety of words. There’s also a person called Smyth who often reminds us it’s spelt with a Y (yes the capital is deliberate) – even though I can read that for myself. This habit of repeating points already made is also often, erm repeated. I don’t know why.

The ‘story’centres on Veronica for some reason deciding to make a variant of

opium. Apparently, she’s a genius, but mad (hence the crazy prose, more of that shortly). After the door incident we learn that Veronica’s mother has been living in the loft, unknown to husband and daughter for over 8 years (yeah, right). Now for another example:

The motherfound woman, once a motherlost girl, and wifefound man, happy and pungent wifelost man the day before, were taken in for questioning.

This is because the presumed dead woman living in the loft has been selling counterfeit DVD’s and partaking in online porn. And the family didn’t know for over 8 years (yeah, right). Veronica’s mother ended up in the loft because she was going to run off with a man, but after a tryst she decides against it:

Fortunately for Jessica all he wanted was a go of her. Unfortunately for Jessica all he wanted was a go of her. Unfortunately for Jessica he wasn’t very good. But fortunately for Jessica he wasn’t very good.

The opium development leads to a death and then disposal of the body. The problem is if the focus was on this thread only the book would (mercifully) be only a few thousand words long. When the opium works Veronica says:

It worked. Did it work? What worked? It did. But did it? It did. What did it do? How did it work? Chemistry. Why did it work? Magic. It did work though, eh? It worked. Did it work? How? Chemistry. Why? Magic. Because. And then. Ha! It worked! Stone me! They might. It worked. It did. It did. It did.

There is even a chapter late in the book where the author describes activities such as‘ties were tied’, developments were developed’, ‘traffic light changed from green to amber to red…(and back again several times)’ – this goes on for page after page with the summation at the end: ‘In short, life in the world progressed for several weeks, unaware of the life of Veronica (where do we go from here?) Dempsey et al.’ I don’t know why.

There are also little footnotes explaining comments, films, and odd little made up words like interpium (internet opium, which was explained several times too). Here are a couple more of the writing examples I found so frustrating. Just a few of the many, many that I could have used:

The void that wasn’t really there that he paid a big-strapping-woman to fill was not filled with sex. Not in the classical word sex.

13 people liked this, 8 people commented but none of the comments commented that the status would have benefitted from a comma.

Sofia pulled Proctor down on top of her and kissed him. His rare cooked steak complimented her Pinot Grigio and their superstring section crescendoed together.

And perhaps my ‘favourite’:

”Let’s get a penguin as a wedding present. We’ll call him Frederick on Sundays and Freddie the rest of the week. I don’t mind if he can’t dance, we’ll still love him. Or her. She can be Freddie as well as and Fredericka on a Sunday. Every new couple should have a penguin. We’ll eat shrimp vol-au-vents and drink Chardonnay together and watch a flatscreen television and Freddie will hug me while you’re out at work.” They sealed the deal with some funky sex followed by dinner at Luigi and Maria’s house where they broke the good news.

It wasn’t just me, I kept reading excerpts out to my wife until she told me to go away. So I stayed up late to finish Magenta Opium otherwise I wouldn’t have slept thinking about the story. Although I’m sure the author saw the point of all this the last comment belongs to the prose:

The rambling woman was still confusing [her] though.

 

Rating? One Star

Would add this to my bookshelf? Erm, no...

Originally reviewed for Books & Pals blog.

Review - Chief Inspector Jewel Friedman by Jan Jacob Mekes

Chief Inspector Jewel Friedman solves five unsolvable cases…

This is the single worst crime / detective ‘book’ I have ever read. By a country mile or three. If the author was deliberately aiming at producing clueless characters, dreadful dialogue and meaningless short stories then Chief Inspector Jewel Friedman would get six out of five stars. In a note at the beginning, the author describes the book as light-hearted detective stories which sometimes feature pretty heavy subject matter – more on this later.

Where to start? There are so many issues to evaluate. Let’s begin with the ‘characters’.There’s Jewel herself. She’s a Chief Inspector but thought Detective Inspector‘sounded cooler’. She cannot relate to people (despite being a detective who needs to have this skill) and makes sense of the world by investigating juicy murders. Jewel drives a broken-down police car – i.e. one that would more than likely fail safety inspections and therefore be illegal. It’s okay though because she later gets a new car as a reward for solving her 50th case – apparently as a result of her colleagues monitoring Jewel’s twitter feed.

Her boss the Superintendent is wet and weak. He simpers over Jewel and allows her to do whatever she wishes. In fact every single character is a cardboard cutout caricature that I cannot believe would exist in the real world, never mind the police force.

The five stories themselves are utterly ridiculous. In the first Lord Ryebread (sigh) is found shot to death in a locked room. It turns out the killer was flying a balloon past at the time and took her revenge. She also happens to be the butler’s daughter (the butler almost did it). Jewel figures all this out by analyzing a voicemail message left by the killer.

Her brilliance doesn’t end there - Jewel uses a nanoparticle tracking device embedded in lipstick to track a suspect she panics into running after having kissed him. Each sends out a GPS signal to make it easier to do so…I am honestly not making this up.

In another, a body is found impaled on The Shard, a very tall building in London. This is how the perpetrators acted:

They killed him earlier, cut out a beam shaped hole and disposed of the body at the top of the tallest building in London, making it seem like a burglary gone wrong.

The dead man is a thief who uses a helicopter to access buildings… Jewel guesses, by seeing a poster, that the killers are a Russian rock band. She confronts the artists when they’re on stage by asking them to play a song titled Body on the Roof by Jimmy and the Jetsets. They act suspiciously, confess all, and are arrested. Just like that.

Another kills and eats people. He just happens to be a friend she meets at the beginning of the piece in Hawaii where she is luckily on holiday. He has a Japanese father too – think that has no relevance? Largely you’re right, other than it seems to give them the desire to eat uncooked flesh.

The dialogue is awful. For example:

Oh, I am so glad you are here! So glad! It’s all so terrible! So terrible!

The major flaw in the stories is there’s no opportunity for the reader to work out the solution for themselves. Each time Jewel goes from murder to answer in a single previously unseen leap. Jewel also makes several serious mistakes. In one case a parcel delivery guy is present at the scene (he actually reports the crime) who she lets go without questioning because he claims he’ll be late on his rounds. This guy tries to create a belief that the suspect is actually a contortionist who he delivered in a crate. I cannot imagine a key witness being released without being questioned. Or anyone falling for or trying on the contortionist angle.

The writing is awful. For example:

The scene Jewel struggled to describe was particularly bloody. On the floor lay the body of a man in a large pool of blood.

To the‘pretty heavy subject matter’. At the end of the first story it’s alluded to that Jewel had a bad upbringing because she has a cat she confides in:

…her father had shown her the care she herself had never got from her own father who had been an abusive alcoholic, how today’s society was way too focused on sex and way too little on love…

The other is child abuse in the final case ‘Sockpuppetry’. A doctor and his mistress, Juliana, are abusing children. Uncle Wellington is found dead and he’s accused of being a child molester. In fact it is the doctor himself and he thinks he’s found a foolproof way of avoiding detection:

The idea of giving Juliana pancreatic cancer was Dr Pryce’s. It would ensure the police got off their tails by spinning the old “what’s the use of persecuting when the criminal is as good as dead” yarn.

Utterly tasteless. I actually sat through this (thankfully short) tale with my mouth open. I suspect ‘persecuting’ should read ‘prosecuting’ too.

Onto Uncle Wellington:

“…any idea why he was called Uncle Wellington?

" …he bore a striking resemblance to the Duke of Wellington…and he always wore wellies…sometimes he would re-enact the battle of Waterloo.”

Ludicrous from beginning to end.

Awful writing, dialogue, characters, everything.

 

Rating? One Stars

Would add this to my bookshelf? Not A Hope!

Originally reviewed for Books & Pals blog.

Review - JusThis, Curt Rude

Charles ‘Badge’ Pullet is a policeman in the small town of Normal. All his life he’s wanted to be on the force and to wear the badge. But Badge has a problem, the Urge, which affects his judgement, drawing him into deeper predicaments even as he rises through the ranks.

The Urge impacts others around him, his wife, his Deputy, and the women he targets, among others. For a small town Normal has some large personalities from which nothing good can come.

This was a seriously disappointing novel, a strange mix of bland ‘thriller’, police procedure ,and trashy erotic novel, although I suspect the latter was unintended.

The Urge is Badge’s sexual proclivity, he cannot help himself when it comes to satisfying his needs. Unfortunately, the author seems to delight in various descriptions of Badge’s penis and what he does with it. JusThis goes through the motions of attempting to bring the issues resulting from Badge’s activities to a justifiable conclusion. Ultimately, it was a depressing end.

A comparatively minor example of Badge’s ‘conquest’ description:

If a woman’s husband didn’t understand her, Badge found out what she needed, then gave it to her–and she did the same for him. She’d get wide-eyed as his pants hit the floor and would spend a wonderful night wrestling with his trouser python, but once it was over, Badge lost interest. Once he had defiled her, the thrill was gone. He’d move on to another man’s bride.

Periodically there would be some description of actual police work, although it tended to be a particularly gruesome car smash or a brush with a troubled personality, some of which had succumbed to ‘Mr. Intoxication’ or ‘Mr. Mental Illness’.

The characters were distinctly unpleasant, I didn’t warm to a single one of them. They all had huge flaws that ultimately made them weak-chinned individuals that I just wanted to shout at, kick in the pants, or both.

There was virtually no dialogue, vast swathes of text was dominated by internalized thought or long descriptions meaning there was little real action until the culmination of the story in the final chapters. What dialogue there was tended to be bland. The following example is supposed to be a light-hearted joke directed at Badge (I imagine it spoken in a high-pitched, Marilyn Monroe like tone):

You’re really the first policeman I’ve ever spent time with. You must be brave to do what you do. I’ve been a good girl all my life, so it’s not like I’ve ever gotten a speeding ticket or been handcuffed.

Enough said, I think.

 

Originally reviewed for Books & Pals blog.

 

Rating? One Star

Would I add this to my bookshelf? No

 

Review - Insane & Out

Jason Carver is a newly promoted, newly divorced tax inspector, but he’s fed up and wants to make a change in his life. Jason has recently inherited a house in Orbaton and he wants to move away from London. However, he needs cash to pay for the refurbishment and afford to have a part-time job (so avoiding paying his ex-wife maintenance). Therefore, Jason bribes a tax evader, Albert Carlotti, to bank roll him.

But Jason has a new neighbor, Dennis Brodan, and they immediately get off on the wrong foot. Brodan is renting Jason’s garage and will not give it up. As Jason’s mind spins out of control, he fixates on Brodan as the source of his ill will and decides to do something about it.

I really don’t understand the purpose of this story. The premise, that Jason is going steadily mad and the underlying reason, aren’t clear at all. I sort of figured out what had ultimately sent him around the bend on the last page, but by then I just didn’t care because most of the outline leading up to it was unclear for a number of reasons.

First, Insane and Out completely failed to engage me. It’s not badly written, but some sentences are odd, i.e. they didn’t seem to fit with the prose, and others were just downright difficult to understand. To give an example of the former:

‘There was no-one else on the train, which hummed with a vile, sonorous drone, just like it was being pulled by a million meat flies.’

Okay Jason was having a dream, but it would probably fit better in the horror genre. And of the latter:

‘His hair was jet black and below his pallid, almost waxy complexion glowed an unhealthy tinge of hectic red.’

I’ve read that sentence perhaps 10 times and I still don’t get it. Maybe it’s me, but why make it difficult for the reader?

The characters are lifeless and add nothing to the narrative. They appear, make a few comments and then sidle off again. Sometimes a potential conflict is created by the character, but almost always isn’t followed through. For example Jason meets someone he calls Wolfman in the opening chapter. Wolfman wakes Jason up, helpfully meaning he doesn’t miss his train stop (the reasons why are explored for a few pages). Then he and the Wolfman walk to the same location. Wolfman invites Jason to join him in the park for a couple of beers…yes it is that dull.

This issue continues throughout the story. At one point Jason thinks Carlotti is going to kill him, potentially interesting, but then this possibility evaporates – instead Carlotti gives Jason a brand new car. The situation Jason gets himself into with Brodan is pointless, who cares that Brodan is renting the garage and he can get to his car faster than Jason? Not me. Yet the author spends many chapters investigating this. Yes, Jason might be going mad but the reason for the conflict? Far, far too weak and unbelievable to create tension in this context.

The dialogue is bland and laborious. It’s like sitting on a bus and being forced to listen in on a particularly boring conversation between two strangers who you hope to never meet again. Unfortunately, you’re treated to every word uttered.

Finally, there was absolutely no sense of place for me. Jason eventually lives in Orbaton, where’s that? In the ‘grim’ north of England where everyone’s ugly (where I happen to come from).

Overall, a very disappointing read that almost sent me mad in the process.

 

Rating? One Star

Would add this to my bookshelf? Categorically No

 

**Originally reviewed on Books & Pals blog.**

Review: A Verse To Murder - Tony Bailie

Dathai Devine, a well known Irish poet, is found dead in dubious circumstances – apparently by his own hand whilst fulfilling a less than salubrious sexual act and under the influence of narcotics. Enter Barry Crowe, investigative journalist, who pursues Dathai’s sad story. En route he meets Dathai’s muses, a policewoman with a bondage fetish, a drunken fellow poet and lesbians with the same odd tattoo on their inner thigh. It’s not long before Barry begins to suspect that there’s more to Dathai’s death than initially meets the eye.

This was a difficult read for a whole range of reasons. Besides the multiple formatting errors (see below) A Verse To Murder was more like a radio play than a novel – heavily weighted towards dialogue after an often cursory introductory description at the beginning of each chapter. This meant there was very little sense of character, place or activity. The story is supposed to occur in Belfast, however it could have been anywhere.

The plot was often disjointed, for example the book opens with Barry supposedly having a dream (I think), before the police turn up at his flat and awaken him. A Chief Inspector Hamilton then explains Dathai is dead under suspicious circumstances before the narrative inexplicably switches to Barry in conversation with a punk girl, Sally (“But don’t tell my friends that,” she says – why?) who appears out of nowhere to politely inform Barry she’d recently sold Dathai some mind bending substances. Although this meeting occurs chronologically after Barry has been to the scene of the crime it appears (that word again) in the book before Barry is described as having arrived at the scene of the crime. Confused? I was, and this was only the first chapter.  

This sudden appearance of characters continues throughout. For example, a policewoman on duty outside Dathai’s house (where the body was discovered) Barry claims to ‘vaguely recognise’ but within a page or two she is back in his flat and naked. Only by chance is she introduced as Dervla with no explanation (ever) as to where Barry knows her from. He also meets a friend, Tom Macken, himself a faded poet and some sort of female consort of Tom’s - again only pages later do we learn her name is Moira.

The story leaps around with little attempt at explaining what happens and why (because of the bias to dialogue). To a person the characters are flaccid, they all walk around in a daze and although Barry seems to have never met most of them before, he needs no effort to bend them to his will and they passively tell Barry everything. For example one of Dathai’s muses, Andrea de Burca, is being blackmailed, this apparently went on for 15 years without her making any attempt to find out who it was or report it to the police. Really?

This isn’t the only event that defies belief. At one point Barry is shot in the head at point blank range and he goes through an odd out of body experience. However, he somehow gets away with just a graze (unfortunately). Even the eventual murderer makes barely a credible appearance before being revealed.

On layout the book was badly formatted with a line break between each and every paragraph. I had to force my eye to skip over these which made for uncomfortable reading. There were also numbers randomly inserted throughout the text and inexplicable tabs were present that forced sentences onto new lines. There were often repetitions of the same word, for example:

“I’m a journalist, said Barry. “I wanted to interview him.”

“Yes I know you are a journalist. What did you want to interview him about?”

“Poetry.”

“Poetry?”

“That’s right, he’s a poet and I wanted to interview him about his poems.”

Oddest of all were when rather than actual speech the following were incorporated:

“…?” or “…!”

I’ve no idea what these are supposed to mean although the characters seemed to.

I really struggled to see a single redeeming feature about A Verse To Murder. Oh yes, it was mercifully short.

 

Rating? One Star

Would add this to my bookshelf? Categorically No

 

**Originally reviewd on Books & Pals blog.**

Sad Jingo - Ron Dionne

Jingo Dalhousie is a troubled wannabe musician who works as a janitor in his cousin’s New York jazz club. He finds his unusual name in a highly successful debut novel and feels driven to track the author down and discover why. However, the author has a secret she’s desperate to keep.

Sad Jingo opens with the protagonist, Jingo Dalhousie, being given a book that, mysteriously, has his name in it. Jingo cannot understand why and decides to track down debut author, Diana Medeiros. By night, he works as a janitor in a club surrounded by jazz musicians, something he aspires to be. The club is owned by his cousin, Harold. By day, he lives in a small flat, attempting to write and play music.

Jingo first goes to Diana’s publishers and then to a signing. There is a huge queue to see Diana, the book is a smash hit. Jingo finally gets to the front and questions her. Diana has no idea who he is and Jingo gets thrown out of the store without any answers. It’s worth saying that to reach this point in the plot I had to plough through 25% of the book – 15,000 words…

The focus then shifts to Diana. We learn she used to be a patient at a mental hospital and perhaps she knew Jingo there? But she cannot remember. Jingo for his own part continues to be obsessed with Diana. He appears at a reading and has a brief conversation with her before being beaten up by a guard and ends up in hospital.

Despite Diana’s reservations, she meets Jingo again and he plays for her in the club, the one time he manages to string together a decent piece of music. But Harold loses control of the business and Jingo is out of a job.

As Diana gets closer to Jingo (primarily because her problem mirrors his) she begins to admit her terrible secret is catching up with her.

If the above sounds a less than exciting summary, I apologise but there was little to get animated about in Sad Jingo. Where to begin? Well, there’s a mass of bland characters, some described, some not (it took me several thousand words to realise Jingo is a man in his sixties, well I think he is). Many of these featureless characters have ridiculous names which are used repeatedly, and often in full, instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’ making the reading a challenge. Jingo and Diana take turns in engaging in long periods of introspective internal dialogue supposedly to help us understand them better. However, this meant it took 25% of the book to achieve three key activities, as I mentioned.

In the early chapters there’s excessive use of punctuation interrupting what little plot flow there is (I was shocked to read an acknowledgement to a copy editor). Some paragraphs are a page or more long and the formatting is not great.

There are other problems – past and present tense are mixed together in the same paragraph on several occasions. The dialogue is often white noise and generally meaningless, dull and barely moves the tale along, like listening to clucking hens. Sentences are regularly horribly mangled with repeated usage of the same word – just two examples comprise:

‘…author of a book about her book but had not read the book.’

‘…what’s wrong with that, what’s wrong with that Harold, tell me a single thing that’s wrong with that?’

In the final chapter Jingo learns Diana has killed herself and, after 62,000 words, I felt like following her…

Rating? 1 Star

Would I add this to my bookshelf? Absolutely not!

**Originally published on Books & Pals blog (http://booksandpals.blogspot.co.uk/). May have received free review copy**