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I got a little side-tracked whilst reading Punctured and, I confess, have put it aside for a few days ... the premise is intriguing enough and the plotting, so far, has kept some interest going.
The difficulty for me is the author's style. How can I put this? It's very "masculine", very "left brain", with niggling details about wrenches and car models and "guy stuff" ... and a paucity of internalised worlds, what makes the characters tick, all that "right brain" of emotion and creativity is largely side-stepped.
This is a bit of a problem because it's hard to develop sympathy for the characters: brother goes to visit sister who calls in a panic, not having spoken to him for two years -- her husband has just been murdered and she's a potential suspect ... imagine what the conversation might be like? A scene like that is tailor made for character development, back-story, grabbing the reader right into the vortex of the sister's predicament and her brother's mixed emotions about being suddenly invoked ... and wondering if she is innocent or spinning lies which (perhaps) led to their estrangement. But there's none of that.
Elsewhere, we get an engineer's description of the inside of trailer home her husband was trying to sell just before his death; or what the office of the clerk minding the storage lockers looks like ... but little of the motivation of the brother, or his reaction at standing before the spot his brother-in-law was murdered only hours before.
If I make it to the end, I may feel the plotting redeems the deficiencies. There are a great many popular authors who lack a literary bent but provide gripping reading because they construct dramatic situations with unexpected twists and turns yet whose characters are pretty work-a-day cardboard cut-outs. If my impressions change, I'll post an update.
Happily, you can download a chapter or two to see if this works for you. The other novel, Angela, is free at the moment and may reveal another of the author's sides as it is, I believe, a ghost story -- or at least has super-natural elements.
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