Summary: A former Irish military man is trying to escape his past by working as a bouncer at a seedy New York City club. When a girl he likes ends up dead, his quiet life become much more messy.
I like to experiment with my reading. My experiments lately have not been all that successful.
I am a fan of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books. And since I have finished the last of the Artemis Fowl books I thought I would explore Colfer’s first adult novel.
The first thing is that it feels like Colfer is trying to make up for having written young adult books all of his career by having the characters swear every two lines. It is not completely outside the realm of possibility with these characters, but it feels forced and unnecessary.
The bigger problems is that the story just wasn’t that engaging. Daniel McEnvoy is trying to get away from his past. He was in the military and suffered PTSD. Throughout the book he has flashbacks to his time with a military shrink. That is real life, but it does not explain how he ended up in New York City or why he has spent the last decade working at seedy bars and clubs that are on the margins of legality.
McEnvoy is a good guy. Throughout the book he is saving people that need saving even when he puts himself at great risk. But it is either out of character or he has repressed that part of himself for the last 10 years.
The end left me a bit cold. It was not great twist. And I really just didn’t care much about why they had made the decisions to get them in the place that they ended up.
It is not a long book. So I pushed through the couple of times that I thought about giving up. I probably should have just given up.
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