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gracenow's review against another edition
4.0
kstets's review
4.0
altruest's review against another edition
4.0
4/5 stars, recommended if you like suspense, and bombs.
jebersviller's review against another edition
4.0
drobnasrnka's review against another edition
4.0
shannny2k's review against another edition
5.0
Series Number: The first.
Author: Robert Crais
(Audio) Narrator: Paul Hecht
One sentence summary: Ex-bomb squad member has to work through her past accident while working on a current case where one of her old coworkers died.
Theme(s): Single past events can drive people’s actions for years. There are multiple ways to cope with PTSD and other results of said past events.
(Audio) Narrator review: I had one huge issue; the main character is a female and they choose a male narrator. I’m not sure why, and distracted me numerous times in the first two chapters. After a while I got used to it, and I think that overall Paul Hecht did a good job, but I think they could have chosen someone similar to the main character; a female who smokes a lot.
What I liked:
I love that page one scene one the main character is talking to a therapist about her problems. This is a great way to start the story, obtaining the mindset of the main character, and the mindset of one person who has been helping her since the accident. (Also both characters are female, so this book passed the Bechdel test immediately which is pretty cool.)
The characters are well defined and have distinctive background events that drive them forward. They all seem real and their actions feel authentic, even when they aren’t professional.
The ending is wonderfully satisfying. No spoilers, so I won’t say more, but it’s unexpected yet completely inevitable.
What I disliked:
Honestly I liked all of it. There is nothing that I can think of that would have made this a better book.
Rating:
9/10 – Excellent read. Lives on my bookshelf. Often recommended to friends. Might or might not read again. (I’ll recommend this to friends that like mystery/thriller, but probably wouldn’t recommend to those who don’t. I would be happy to read it again if I ever forget enough of it to make it worthwhile, but I suspect that this book will be sticking with me for a long time.)
nocto's review against another edition
Where do I start? I want to like Robert Crais. I don't think he writes badly. I don't think he plots badly. I don't think his characters are bad. But none of them are good enough and every aspect of his work seems endemically infected with stereotypes.
I picked up the Elvis Cole series on the eighth book and I thought the ending was lousy but I reckoned that it wasn't written for me. It was the kind of ending a long time series reader could live with. After eight books you can forgive your heros for acting heroically and in the interests of truth, justive and the American way. This however was a standalone book. Everything known about these characters and all the justification for the twists in the plotline has to be between these covers.
Our heroine was once dead. For a couple of minutes after a bomb exploded her heart stopped and she was saved by paramedics. She was a bomb technician seeking to defuse that bomb. So was her lover. He died and the same time she did but he didn't get resucitated. I think it's fair enough to find our heroine, several years later, still a bit freaked out by this and with some alcoholic leanings. She's now a detective with the LAPD and her current case involves finding the person who planted another bomb that has killed another bomb technician. So far we have an interesting story and it could have easily been a good one. There were numerous elements to the story that were interesting and orginal but I don't remember those.
What i do remember, though I've forgotten some of them, is how many cliched elements there were to this story. There was a federal agent who wasn't really a federal agent. There was the rural cop who overlooked something obvious to the city cop. There was the perpetrator killing off the informant. There was the... oh, I'd be here hours if I went through them. None of them were major problems on their own, but strung together I felt like I was being subjected to the results of the 'How to Write a Thriller 101' course. When our heroine has her police shield removed from her three chapters from the end I shut the book in disgust.
There are books I like in spite of their faults. This isn't one of them.
zzzrevel's review against another edition
4.0
Good prose and generally good characterization (despite the 'troubled soul' comment), with a fairly decent plot that has some nice twists. There is kind of an unbelievable love connection thing that transpires so that knocked this down a notch in my opinion.
However, I enjoyed this standalone more than anything I've ever read in his Elvis Cole series, but I might have to go back to them just to be sure.....
Anyway - a good read overall.