Review:
Not one of Mark Mills's best
I have enjoyed some of Mark Mills's previous books and hoped that this would be as good. Sadly, it isn't really. It was a light and fairly easy read but the plot is pretty silly and I had some reservations about the writing style, too.
The plot revolves around Ben, a struggling screen writer whose script is accepted by a billionaire tycoon and so becomes swept into the glamorous world of the super-rich...but is there Something Sinister underlying all this? I won't say more to avoid spoilers but it's pretty standard potboiler stuff and it isn't the remotest bit plausible. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is far too long to be sustained by such a flimsy story. Almost nothing but scene-setting happens for the first 200 pages, I genuinely groaned later on at the thought that there were *still* 150 pages to go and the ending is frankly ridiculous.
The writing is adequate but no more, and often rather lazy with stale phrases like "a dab hand at..." or people "puffing away merrily" on expensive cigars creeping in regularly. Mills is at pains to show us how much he knows - not always successfully - so we get lots of little vignettes which add nothing at all to the plot in which people play rugby and cricket ("centre stump"? - I don't think so, Mark), visit museums and have discourses about the artefacts and so on. He also cannot resist telling us what he has just shown us, so after a bit of dialogue he has to say things like "He had successfully deflected the conversation away from the subject," when that was obviously the whole point of what I had just read. This, and laboured references to literary and artistic works left me feeling rather patronised a lot of the time.
Mark Mills is capable of much better than this. I'd say it was OK as a mildly diverting beach read but not much more.
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