Kate

A grain of salt...or a tablespoon

Reviewed: 08-02-18

I've apparently stopped letting it bother me that the FBI agents portrayed here and in the Brit in the FBI series prefer vigilante justice. I like the stories and I like the characters. If police and agents really treated unconvicted criminals with this little concern for their rights I'd be very upset but this is fiction and since I keep buying them I guess I've decided to let abuse of power slide. I'm not proud of that because I see lack of concern for people individuals consider less than they themselves are due to race, religion, etc as a growing problem in our society and it should bother me in fiction as well. I can't justify that but I enjoy the plot lines and twists Coulter contrives a great deal.

*Hope that this doesn't constitute a spoiler*
I like clear cut bad guys and good guys and that's what I got here, even if some of the "good guys" were (technically) criminals.

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20 people found this helpful

really bad choice for narrator

Reviewed: 04-06-18

Although I've enjoyed Underwood for other of the Amanda Quick books this one is really an uncomfortable fit. I ended up moving the speed up because I wanted to hear how the story came out but I still didn't really enjoy it.

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not a favorite

Reviewed: 12-27-16

I've been reading and listening to Nora Roberts' books for more than two decades. There was a time when I didn't believe she could write a book a wouldn't re-read countless times but there are a few and this is one of them.

Her characters make the books for me so that even if I've read a book a dozen times and know who did what when I'll go back and read the book again to revisit characters who are old friends and listen again to the bits of dialog that define their humanity and humor. There are two central female characters, Eve and Julia. It took a long time to care about them, I did finally care about half way through or it would have been s one star book for me.

There are a plethora of slimey characters to dislike and vascillate between for villain and lots of decent plot twists. I'm usually good at guessing who done it ahead of time and in this book I was nearly to the end before I figured it out. All of that makes a good book but inability to care much about the characters brought my rating down. I know that I owned this book in print and must have read it at least once in the past. I have a truly bad memory which allows me to enjoy a mystery several times before I know it well enough to have no surprises. This was long enough that I remembered only the cover and none of the plot so the fact that I was surprised several times means that I'm not sorry I heard it. Since I don't want to listen again until I've forgotten it all, I think I'd just as soon borrow a library copy rather than own it.

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1 person found this helpful

It was good enough that I finished the book

Reviewed: 07-17-16

but that's the best I can say. I didn't much care for the central characters. I found them whiney. this is definitely a mid-90s story. The characters were stock, the heroine is shrill though some of that may have been the narrator's interpretation. She is a bossy know-it-all who jumps to conclusions constantly and does little fact finding. It's hard to picture her as taking over a falling department store and putting it back on its feet (that happened before the beginning pig the book). Her opponents are a sleazy realtor, the kind that wears a flashy diamond ring to show how successful he is, and the town's mayor who is strident in her desire to turn the town into a trendy boutique vacation area. When someone finally gets killed it's almost a relief. It could be reworked into a good story but with Krentz writing so many winners and apparently never at a loss for ideas I can't see why she would want to.

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I found the dramatization intolerable

Reviewed: 06-12-16

Usually I enjoy BBC productions but this was a complete waste of listening time for me. I never managed to finish the first book and kept going back to it and quitting again. Most dramatizations I'm familiar with are done with a narrator, this attempted to convey all of the story with dialog which required the characters to essentially talk to themselves constantly to create portions of the story that discussed background, scenery or the passage of time. I've read and re-read these books innumerable times over the last fifty years and wanted to be able to listen to them instead. I also own the individual audiobooks which are better but I like the continuity of a single narrator or team of narrators for a series of books so those don't really satisfy me either. I would love to hear this from Full Cast Audio since their work is the standard I use to measure audiobooks that use a cast of characters rather than one or two narrators.

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The fascination of a grisly car wreck

Reviewed: 05-22-16

I liked the plot but the details were too gruesome for me. It was also a fairly slow start.

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The narration is really annoying

Reviewed: 04-08-15

I'll start by saying that I certainly can't do better, but I'm not a professional narrator. It's only the one voice that made me cringe: Trent. The upper class Boston businessman who shows up to buy the Calhoun's family home to remodel as a hotel. His accent sounds more like a bad version of New Jersey mob. I've re-read the dead tree version of the book countless times since it was published in 1991 (you may find some of the situations a little outdated but it hasn't bothered me in this book). As much as I dislike abridgments I've owned the first two books in the series in the abridged versions (only 2 hours, they had to cut more than half the story) since they became available in 1998. Those were narrated by Laural Merlington, who is just about always at the top of my list of narrators. So I looked forward to these coming out as unabridged audiobooks for a long time. Then I had a hard time finishing this one. I put it down and listened to half a dozen books before I came back to finish it this morning and I almost put it back down but there was only an hour to go.

To temper my overall negative review I have to say that I will take a chance on the 2nd book. Since Trent is the only voice that bothers me and he doesn't show up as much in the succeeding books I hope that this is a one off complaint rather than a slam on the series. You don't get to hear Trent speak during the sample so I can't suggest that listening to that will help you decide whether it's a voice that won't bother you the way it did me. It's a good enough story though of the five in the series it's my least favorite. Its importance is in the fact that it lays the foundation for the series. You could always read this one and go on to listen to others but if you're like me there isn't a lot of time to sit and read these days so I turn to audio books. I relisten to audio books since I'm fortunate enough to have a poor memory and can enjoy them repeatedly, Still, with some series I skip a book if I know the story well enough and I expect that I'll skip this one most of the time, I might listen to it every couple of years to re-lay the series foundation but I may just take time to read it instead.

If you like old Nora Roberts books I can recommend the narrations of the Stars of Mithra series and the Mackade Brothers series. I had a few problems with the narration of the Mackades but I've listened through a couple of times since they came out so it certainly didn't bother me the way this did. The second and third books of the Stars just came out so I've only listened to them once but they were very enjoyable.

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8 people found this helpful

I was surprised not to enjoy a Carolyn Hart book.

Reviewed: 11-30-13

I really enjoyed the premise of the book, that Nela could hear cats' thoughts. That was only a small portion of the story. Sort of the jumping off point. There was the cast of characters, perhaps twenty names to keep straight. Get Ann a job? Who was Ann? That happened a lot. Then there were the two main characters, Nela and Steve. Nela is getting over the death of her significant other (we don't know if they were childhood sweethearts or spouses, only that he was the Love of her Life). Steve is getting over his feelings of betrayal over his fairly recent divorce. Yet here they are, thinking about relationships with one another within a few days of meeting. The plot is good but the death goes missing in all the subplots.

Then there's the mystery. Through the first half of the book I thought that the mystery was going to stay ... a mystery. Through the second half of the book they hit you over the head with The Clue over and over, but the police and protagonists kept misinterpreting The Clue.

I liked Nela and Steve. I liked the cat. I didn't like the detective, she was too one sided and tended to jump to conclusions. And I didn't care much for the story. It would be ok for a free read from the library but it's certainly not something I'd want to come back to in the future.

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3 people found this helpful

Fun escapist reading, though a little off

Reviewed: 05-17-13

I enjoyed the premise of the series very much, three brother are trying to rebuild the town they grew up in more than 10 years after an F5 tornado destroyed it. The characters are little over drawn, too much the stereotype. The men working on the project are getting restless and one of the brothers convinces his siblings that if there were women living there things would be better. So they put an ad in a northern city hit hard by the recession for single women with a pioneering spirit. The three things that bothered me: first the women all show up together after having talked among themselves and organized the exodus. Second, the women are ticked off because there's no vegan menu, no fresh fruit, no yogurt, no shoe stores... excuse me ladies, did you read the part about "pioneering spirit"? and third I thought that the heroine ended up with the wrong brother, it would have flowed better for me, but it was possible to follow the lines that created the attraction, it was just a little unlikely.

Based on getting this book on a special "first in a series" sale I went ahead and got the other two books, which got increasingly poor reviews from me, to the point that I've returned the third book in the series as too annoying to re-read. So it you're looking for a fulfilling series, maybe you should skip this one. If you’re looking for a little escapism, this is certainly a good fun book and book 2 wasn't too annoying, I even enjoyed it when I wasn't fretting over the stupid way the characters behaved toward one another.

So, I can neither recommend or advise avoidance. For the one book, I'd say go ahead and enjoy it if you're got a credit going to waste otherwise. But if you don't mind a paper copy, get them all from the library instead. It's not really a series worth owning.

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1 person found this helpful

Not a good first book

Reviewed: 10-10-12

I got this book as part of a $5 purchase deal. I have liked other David Baldacci books and I might have liked this one if I'd read all of the books leading up to it. Still I'm not sure because the references to the past don't sound like anything I'd like to have read my way through. The reader is good enough but very matter of fact. It largely strikes me as a guys' book. It's not that the women are weak or one dimensional but I just don't like the people much and that tends to happen more often in books written by men than in books written by women. I don't like to show such a gender bias. I don't like all books written by women or dislike all books written by men. Still, when I dislike a book by a man I can seldom pinpoint why. I wish I could be more helpful, for example, Dick Francis is one of my favorite writers, but in his mind men just are likely to have non committed sex while married. That bothers me. Similarly, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum is in love with two guys, Ranger and Joe. At times in the series she has sex with both of them, though in her defense she isn't married and is not quite in a committed relationship with Joe. But the double standard exists. If we were to read that Joe was having sex with someone other than Stephanie we would be incensed. Especially if it was Joyce. Not that I've heard anyone in this book having sex with anyone (so far, and from the middle of the second part, I doubt that I will finish the book) I'm just trying to give all of you some idea of what I do/don't care for in books in hopes that this will help you evaluate the relevancy of my review to your reading tastes.

In summary: If my review strikes a responsive note with you, don't read the book. If it doesn't turn you off on the book, read the other Camel Club books before reading this one. There's too much insider information that you don't know if you start here, and there's too much spoiler information to go back and read the earlier books after this one. It was a bad book to have on a sale page because of those facts. It's ok to have several books from a series but some series don't work well if you come in in the middle.

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