James Carol - The Quiet Man

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I'm afraid I didn't get on with The Quiet Man at all.  I tried this because the Vancouver setting sounded interesting and Faber have a well-deserved reputation for publishing quality books.  Sadly, there was little sense of place and the book itself was a very run-of-the-mill affair.

There is a serial killer who targets women (of course) and murders them – sorry, "brutally murders" them, of course – by strapping a home-made bomb to them which is triggered by a family member opening a door in their house.  This happens every 5^th August, and Jefferson Winter, former FBI profiler and son of a serial killer (!) meets up with unjustly forced-out ex-Vancouver cop Laura Anderton as private investigators in a Race Against Time (of course) to stop the killer striking again.

It's as cliché-ridden as it sounds.  Winter and Anderton spend a lot of time telling each other things they already know in that brisk, Professional-ese which people only use in stories like this.  Winter is so empathetic he's practically psychic.  The characters are straight out of Crime Central Casting, including the vain, self-seeking and incompetent Police investigator, the unscrupulous, untrustworthy journalist…you get the idea.  The plot moves slowly and rather predictably with lots of unconvincing padding and technical-sounding but rather vacuous detail.  For example, if you strap a bomb to someone's chest with a hard case facing outwards but an open side toward the chest, it's blindingly obvious to the meanest intelligence that the blast will be directed toward the chest and kill them, isn't it?  But Winter has to say – to experienced intelligent professionals who apparently take him seriously:

"It all comes down to physics.  Something that has forward momentum, whether that's a river or a waveform or the blast wave from an explosion, will always seek out the path of least resistance.  That's what happened here.  The blast is directed toward the victims.  Ultimately, that's what kills them." 

Well, thanks for that, Jefferson; it's a good job you're here to tell us that.  Not only is it absurd in context, as a physicist I can tell you that the "physics" is a load of meaningless waffle.  And, "ultimately, that's what kills them."?  Please!  They've been blown to bits by a bomb and you have to point out that "ultimately" it kills them?

I became increasingly irritated and bored by all this stuff, I'm afraid.  Stilted dialogue, tedious and clichéd plot, generic setting, by-numbers characters…maybe this would be OK for mindless distraction for half a day on the beach, but I really didn't enjoy it.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)