When a Free Book is Barely Worth the Cost: Cruel Justice
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Author: M. A. Comley
Title: Cruel Justice Genre: mystery One upon a time you could tell that a book was going to be bad because the dust jacket review quotes were from cities the size of Helena or Fort Lauderdale. Then you could suss out quality by the vagueness of the author blurbs (or the low profiles of that authors). Now you can tell by the number of 5-star reviews at Amazon. Cruel Justice by M. A. Comley has 138 five-star reviews: damn! but some people have no taste… This is the first in a series featuring DI Lorne Simpkins (for us yanks, a DI is a “Detective inspector” and – the actor who played Ben Cartwright from “Bonanaza” notwithstanding, Lorne is female), a cop somewhere in England who investigates murders. She has plenty of murders on her hands for Cruel Justice, at least four committed by… well, by someone quite nasty. Besides her cop-ly duties, Simpkins also spends a good deal of time dithering about the story state of her marriage (12-year-old daughter Charlie and house-husband Tom). She’s also quite taken with an urbane French coroner – at least by the end of the story, odd given that on page one she can’t abide the prissy Frog. The mystery is a run-of-the-mill spree-killer tale leavened only by the fact that the quite well-organized villain seems oddly prone to mistakes, such as murdering the wrong victim. “Oops!” as Rick Perry is wont to say. Simpkins and her team do remarkably little detective work to find the evildoer, and are completely puzzled even though he likes to telephone the cops and let them know he is watching that very moment. As the protagonist is female, it’s a sure bet that she will find herself trapped alone with the bad guy in the last chapter. Duh. Cruel Justice is utterly predictable (not to mention that the author tipped her hand on the identity of the killer’s accomplice). The characters are stock cardboard heavily influenced by television, including such tropes as the lone female of the investigative team being bitchy with her female boss and the ex-lover who comes back to haunt the heroine. A clumsy, lackluster plot in which a common drudge manages to outwit what we assume is a team of experienced cops is further marred by stodgy, stilted writing and overindulgence in romance and family problems. DI Simpkins is clearly a lousy mother, given that she thinks of her daughter a lot less often than she thinks of the handsome Frenchman. The crowning glory is a ludicrous final paragraph: how transparent can you get! Oh, well, at least I got this one free… and it was worth every penny. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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