As in prior books, Stinnett does a good job with action scenes but spends too much time on minor details elsewhere. Here, for example, he spends the better part of a chapter covering a flight the main characters take, including radio exchanges between the pilot and the various controllers he contacts where each one parrots back what the other said. I know that’s how it’s done in real life (and that’s a good thing because it leaves no room for misunderstandings) but here one go-round would have been enough with the rest covered in narrative. Show isn’t always better than tell – especially when it slows the story down.
Stinnett tends to repeat himself is in describing things as well. We are constantly reminded what all was done to Jesse’s island and what Rusty did to turn the area around his bar into a marina. Ditto when it comes to having every boat go up on plane whenever it hits open water. Once or twice is enough, Mr. Stinnett.
There are places, too, where Stinnett has Jesse refer to one character in narrative then in the next sentence address a comment to a different character without a clue to who he is speaking to. It causes a momentary lurch in the story flow (especially when both characters are male or female) until I catch onto the shift.
The same huge cast of characters from the last book is here as well. And I still can’t keep them straight. Tony or Trent? Doc, Deuce, or Dawson? Jeremy, Julie, Jared, or Jackie? To complicate matters further, Stinnett adds more characters throughout the book until they all kind of blend into one. The only character I’m absolutely sure about is Jesse – only because he’s the main character – and that Julie and Jackie are female. You need to re-work your name choices and thin the herd a bit, Mr. Stinnett.
Still as long as he keeps writing them, I’ll keep reading them.