On the Run by Iris Johansen (Thriller Fiction)Story Summary in about 30 words: The story focuses on a former CIA agent and how she is now in hiding and being protected by the CIA. Her world crashes around her as the bad guys find her. Her only hope is a former colleague and lover.
Rate of Interest: 20.0 pages per day (400 total pages)
Best Thing about the Book: The first 100 pages are pretty good. Really, I don't have much more good things to say about it. The action is intense if not ludicrous.
Worst Thing about the Book: Where to begin? Seriously. Do I talk about the 8-year old daughter who comes off sounding like she is 25 years old the entire book? I mean, yes, they said she was gifted all the time to try and cover how crazy it was, but it was just silly. Or could it be how the woman lead of the book is a 'horse whisperer'? You hear how a horse has not been tamed by 50 different people, yet when she walks in, she talks to the horse for a couple of hours and the horse now does whatever she wants. Ridiculous. Or, could it be the really, really cartoonish bad guy? He threatens the daughter, he threatens the woman, he threatens the man, he threatens the animals. I kept waiting for him to threaten the trees or the dirt. The main tough guy who is the good guy is pretty silly. They talk about how tough he is, but in reality, he sounds like a metrosexual. All we hear is that he is the toughest man alive but the book is littered with him whining and near tears throughout it. Seriously, it is pretty brutal at times. I wanted to hug the guy by the end of it.
Overall: Worst book that I have read so far this year. Painful. It is too bad because the author is quite good and has had a lot of success. The plot keeps moving along so you keep reading all the while shaking your head about how dumb it all really is.
The Husband by Dean Koontz (Thriller Fiction)Story Summary in about 30 words: A guy who owns his landscape company gets a chilling phone call that his wife has been kidnapped. They will give her back only if he gives them $2 million. Problem is, he makes only around $40K a year. They kill others around him and he is forced to decide who is friends are and who he can trust to get her back within those couple of days.
Rate of Interest: 60.0 pages per day (416 total pages)
Best Thing about the Book: Koontz knows how to keep you on the edge of your seat. It is intense and often disturbing and you see how far someone is willing to go to save his wife. The bad guys are really bad and the race to saving his wife will keep you reading.
Worst Thing about the Book: There are times when you see some of the implausibility and there are several parts of the book that are not looked into more and that hurts the overall book.
Overall: This is true escapism. Even thru some of the unbelievable sections of the book, it keeps you interested and wanting to see if he can get to his wife and to see if his wife can survive her kidnappers.
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