Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-accident"
The Accident
Reading “The Accident” by Chris Pavone was accidental indeed. Generally I prefer reading real books printed on paper, but preparing for a trip that required reading matter but minimal luggage of the least weight possible, I downloaded this enthusiastically reviewed book, just published with much fanfare, onto my Kindle. I have never read Chris Pavone’s previous books but “The Accident” sounded like fun, a crime story involving the publishing industry – a potentially interesting setting.
Alas, the book turned out to be a great disappointment. It fails on several levels: poorly written, needlessly over-complicated, but worst of all, lacking a satisfying denouement, an unforgivable sin in such a book. Having finished it, the overwhelming sense I had was annoyance, for, essentially, having wasted my time.
Where to begin? The fundamental premise, that of a manuscript submitted anonymously to an agent containing explosively dangerous material is promising, and initially one gets hooked trying to guess the identity of the manuscript’s author and the nature of the scandalous expose it contains. When the first bodies begin to fall, it is still an interesting crime story. But soon an imbalance begins to appear: there are, by my count, at least eleven characters who fall by the wayside, most of them only very peripherally connected to the wandering manuscript that is being casually copied by all and sundry as it makes its way from New York to Los Angeles to various parts of Europe. The character principally responsible for most of these deaths, an ex-CIA operative doing this job as a freelancer, is not sufficiently explained; and a sidekick he employs, a woman with whom he had had a past history, simply disappears from the book halfway through, never referred to again. (I had subsequently read that in Pavone’s previous book “The Expats” this woman was the main character, so she was made to re-appear to please previous readers; since I am not one of their numbers, she was annoyingly meaningless to me.) The imbalance between the contents of the manuscript, explosive as it is, and the wholesale deaths it causes in its wake are wholly out of proportion. The shadowy character of “the author” (whose actual identity becomes quite clear around the middle of the book) turns out to be thoroughly reprehensible, committing a senseless murder of an entirely innocent bystander who has the bad luck to be in his way while making an escape attempt. There is a sexual encounter between the central female character and her sidekick that serves the sole purpose of including some sex in the book; it does not advance the plot and is completely out of character for her. At the close of the book, the manuscript is indeed unpublished, all of its copies having been destroyed, the perpetrators of the murderous scheme to prevent its publication having won; the ambivalent villain of the piece literally sails off into the sunset to a well-prepared new life with a new identity; but there is an allusion to a possibility of a future publication (presumably in a future Chris Pavone book?) for there is, after all, a copy of the manuscript hidden somewhere.
The writing throughout the book made one think of a committee of people sitting in a room and adding-subtracting plot ideas and styles. Some of the dialogue is simply pedestrian, poorly chosen words and sentences, and yet there are pages and pages of lyrical descriptions of cities, landscapes, interiors that are there seemingly as “fill”, as if the book was deemed not long enough and needed added pages to bring it up to the desired length. It reads as if these segments had been written by different people. All in all, an entirely unsatisfactory crime novel, and if there is a sequel in the making, I do not plan to read it.
Alas, the book turned out to be a great disappointment. It fails on several levels: poorly written, needlessly over-complicated, but worst of all, lacking a satisfying denouement, an unforgivable sin in such a book. Having finished it, the overwhelming sense I had was annoyance, for, essentially, having wasted my time.
Where to begin? The fundamental premise, that of a manuscript submitted anonymously to an agent containing explosively dangerous material is promising, and initially one gets hooked trying to guess the identity of the manuscript’s author and the nature of the scandalous expose it contains. When the first bodies begin to fall, it is still an interesting crime story. But soon an imbalance begins to appear: there are, by my count, at least eleven characters who fall by the wayside, most of them only very peripherally connected to the wandering manuscript that is being casually copied by all and sundry as it makes its way from New York to Los Angeles to various parts of Europe. The character principally responsible for most of these deaths, an ex-CIA operative doing this job as a freelancer, is not sufficiently explained; and a sidekick he employs, a woman with whom he had had a past history, simply disappears from the book halfway through, never referred to again. (I had subsequently read that in Pavone’s previous book “The Expats” this woman was the main character, so she was made to re-appear to please previous readers; since I am not one of their numbers, she was annoyingly meaningless to me.) The imbalance between the contents of the manuscript, explosive as it is, and the wholesale deaths it causes in its wake are wholly out of proportion. The shadowy character of “the author” (whose actual identity becomes quite clear around the middle of the book) turns out to be thoroughly reprehensible, committing a senseless murder of an entirely innocent bystander who has the bad luck to be in his way while making an escape attempt. There is a sexual encounter between the central female character and her sidekick that serves the sole purpose of including some sex in the book; it does not advance the plot and is completely out of character for her. At the close of the book, the manuscript is indeed unpublished, all of its copies having been destroyed, the perpetrators of the murderous scheme to prevent its publication having won; the ambivalent villain of the piece literally sails off into the sunset to a well-prepared new life with a new identity; but there is an allusion to a possibility of a future publication (presumably in a future Chris Pavone book?) for there is, after all, a copy of the manuscript hidden somewhere.
The writing throughout the book made one think of a committee of people sitting in a room and adding-subtracting plot ideas and styles. Some of the dialogue is simply pedestrian, poorly chosen words and sentences, and yet there are pages and pages of lyrical descriptions of cities, landscapes, interiors that are there seemingly as “fill”, as if the book was deemed not long enough and needed added pages to bring it up to the desired length. It reads as if these segments had been written by different people. All in all, an entirely unsatisfactory crime novel, and if there is a sequel in the making, I do not plan to read it.
