Meh…
I didn’t love this book. It wasn’t funny at all, despite the cover claiming it’s “humorous.” The writing was a little weird…every character spoke like an English Lit paper. The characters were all completely 1-dimensional. The author wrote in third person but the reader had insight into every single character’s inner thoughts and physical sensations. The story wasn’t really believable but not in a comedic way…just lots of plot holes, like the FBI breathing down a suspect’s neck for things that aren’t crimes. Two identical paintings—one a Van Gogh, one a forgery—but the home-mixed lead paint and aged canvas were the same on both, so the authorities couldn’t tell which was real and which wasn’t…but they were chomping at the bit to arrest the forger for theft of the original paintings despite not knowing which was the actual original. And if the forger could pass them off as indistinguishable from the originals, why bother stealing the real ones to sell overseas when they could have sold the fake ones and passed them off as originals? Lots of holes like that, and a large amount of typos (a character’s name misspelled once, missed words, added words [such as “he could have have gone…”], etc). All the characters could do amazing feats with no experience or training (hand-to-hand combat in complete darkness, scaling 10-foot spike-topped walls, expertly using chemicals, etc). There was a truth serum…c’mon. That just screams of a lack of creativity. Things got repeated unnecessarily (like the same scenario would be explained three times: as it happened, and then as two other characters learned of it…the reader had to read the details thrice). The whole story wasn’t believable, the characters lacked depth and were all just basic caricatures (the nerd who never did a bad thing in his life, the con man who can’t ever be honest, the rich man who is an arrogant jerk to everyone, the “ace” reporter who can uncover any truth in record time based on hunches and whose sole goal in life is reporting, the slacker who accomplished nothing, the brute security guard who is strong and dumb, the FBI agent and cop who both are straight-laced and have their guy and look nowhere else, etc), and the editing was lazy. Honestly, it felt like it was written by a fifth grader (PLEASE tell me the author is, in fact, 11). All in all, I was bored throughout. Don’t waste your time on this one. Glad I got this for free or I’d be begging for my money back.