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Recently finished The Feather Men by Ranulph Fiennes (the explorer), which has been made into the film Killer Elite. I found this book a slog to get through, and kept checking the percentage progress in the hopes of seeing it leap forward. This was partly due to the writing style which I found flat and often uninteresting, and partly due to the fact that it didn't seem to know if it was a thriller or a non-fiction retelling of actual events. I only persevered because it was part of a reading challenge so was determined to see it through.
It was written like a non-fiction work (every acronym or slightly unusual word was then explained in brackets, frequently quite unnecessarily), and the "exciting" scenes were told in a completely matter-of-fact way, losing any sense of tension. The time-line also jumped all over the place, and between sets of characters, without warning and sometimes almost in the middle of a paragraph, so it took time to realise that the scene had changed.
All that aside, it was well researched, and the background information was interesting at times. If the story is a true one, and clearly elements of it are based on fact, then it should have been told that way. I know I would have enjoyed it far more had I not been second-guessing all the way through whether it was supposed to be a thriller or a documentary.
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