Too Much of What the Author Knows
When I first went to listen to this book, I was thrilled because it’s written by an author who lives in the same town as me. Plus both the print and audio versions are published by local presses. Then I started to listen. Ugh. This is just more of the usual career-aggrandizing formulaic cop fiction that tries to be something more with its spurious quoting of Shakespeare, San Diego history, and random journal entries. It fails the formula, too, and the climax is too short to have any significant impact. The book comes across as a hodgepodge of approaches to writing the book and as an exercise in the author sharing what he knows about literature and history. Also, he references his Mercury Tracer often. The story is set in 1979; the Tracer didn’t hit the market until 1987. Whoops. Barry Kraft’s narration helps lift up this otherwise amateur novel.