Thriller - Jeff Abbott - Collision (2008)

Believe it or not, I only recently got a library card. I know, right? Especially with it being within walking distance and with monthly writers' group meetings there. But the fact of the matter is with an extensive personal library, it's hard to justify picking up a book at the public library.

But since I had to do something uncomfortable to practice skills learned in group therapy, I decided to make it something that would reward me. So, fresh and new library card in hand, I picked up the first book in the fiction section that was not a Book # of Many More.

Collision is about two guys on the run from the law and more dangerous guys. Ben Forsberg is a consultant to a security corporation and is a person of interest now because a guy who killed another guy left Ben's business card with the corpse. Pilgrim is a guy who works for a secret government agency that has been ripped apart by bad guys, and is also the guy who left the card. They have to learn to trust each other because they've both been set up to take the fall for a bunch of shit.

This book is like an action movie in book form. If you like CIA dramas, terrorism thrillers, and murderer mysteries, you might find something you like in this book. Personally, I recognize that it isn't FOR me. Also, the theme song of this book should be "It's a Small World" because everyone is being played by someone else regardless of how many years between. Almost no character is used only once, unless as bullet fodder. So don't sit there thinking one person will never show up again until they are dead. Because they will. Ad nauseum.

All in all, I didn't enjoy reading this book. But like I said, it's not FOR me. It's for someone else. So maybe you would enjoy it. But to me it feels very average, almost mediocre.

6.5/10

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Thriller - S.J. Watson - Before I Go To Sleep (2011)

This one I borrowed from my friend Nadia, along with a few others. To paraphrase her selling of it to me, it's basically a thriller version of the movie Fifty First Dates.

If you've never seen that particular Adam Sandler movie, allow me to elaborate further. The main character of this book has a mental condition that does not allow her to transfer the day's short-term memories into long-term memory. As a result, every day she wakes up not knowing what happened the day before, or even in the years since she developed this condition, or (since memory is a tricky thing) who she is.

Upon sneaking to see a doctor about her condition years after it has developed, she has begun writing a journal about her day, including things that she has found out about herself and her long-suffering husband. But things are starting to come back to her, and they are not fitting up with what her husband is telling her. So she is beginning to wonder what else he is lying about, especially since he seems to be the only source of information for her.

I have a few problems with this book, but unfortunately time has given me an opportunity to become kinder towards it.

First off, this book is touted as a debut novel, and it shows; the dialogue-based explanation in the prologue and the Bond-villain style speech by the Big Bad at the end is amateur hour through and through. Even the assurances constantly of when the main character is writing in her journal are unnecessary; we get she's hiding it from her husband. You don't have to keep fucking telling us what she's doing to hide it from him.

The reviews coating the cover put its fast pace on a pedestal, and honestly it's because it's the only thing it really has going for it. The pages really do flip quick, but the coincidences required for this story to work out really challenge a reader's ability to suspend disbelief. It feels written, and everyone knows that writing that feels like writing is garbage sauce. It needed a few more rewrites before it went out to public eyes, but it didn't get that. So we have a lacking novel with a fast pace that is good only because it's stay will not be long.

Sorry, Nadia.

5.0/10

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Buy it @ Barnes & Noble.