Well, when I actually socialize (not often, granted, but it happens), I get a lot of "so, read anything good lately?" WELL. I've been "in-house reviewing" a lot of books this week. And this one just wrote its own review in my head while I was driving home tonight (not great, but totally accurate):
Waking with Enemies
Eric Jerome Dickey
978-0-451-22274-9 (yes I remember the ISBN 4 hours later)
Pretend
you are out to eat at a fast food joint. Imagine a French fry. Imagine a side of ketchup
(or cheese or ranch or whatever, but I like ketchup). Imagine how a
French fry
exists to bring the ketchup to your mouth.
Now pretend that you are reading
Waking with Enemies by
Eric Jerome Dickey. The plot, Gideon, a professional hit man salted
with the rage of a traumatic childhood is on the run from retribution
for his last hit, is the French fry. The sex, frequent
and graphic – he is something
of an international man of mystery, after all – is the ketchup. Plot
and sex, French fry and ketchup, complete a recipe for a perfect
bite of non-cerebral bliss.
Only imagine there’s
no French fry.
I
held on, oh I held on for over 200 pages, waiting for the plot to get
started; and it must be a good one to be this late in coming, right?
Nope. In addition,
most of the time the reader can’t tell which character is speaking. Is
it Gideon? One of the two women he liaises with every chance he gets?
The man out to kill him? The characterization is so bland and the
dialogue so quick, yet banal, there’s no point
in trying to figure it out anyway. There are
a couple of good action scenes late in the book, and a couple of minor, predictable
twists. However, these slightly brighter points only shine the light on
the sole purpose of
this book: a vehicle for the author to vicariously live a James
Bond-like life of beautiful women, expensive restaurants, underground
contacts, danger, and, most of all, lots of descriptive sex.
Verdict: Only pick this one up if you're dying for punishment.
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