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A review by sisteray
The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton
3.0
There's nothing wrong with this book. It does all the stuff that it's supposed to do. It takes you through the story so that you get a clean complete picture of this character's life, and it's broken into two different timelines in the main character's life so that you can get rising tension from both stories simultaneously.
But, I don't know, it's played really straight. For me it felt like it all follows this prescriptive plot on rails to guide the reader through all the plot points. A boy gets sucked into a life of crime because of his lock picking skills. There aren't any twists. And there wasn't a lot of real mystery. When I say real mystery, the main character has a secret, but really it's mostly a secret from the reader. The public in the book knows the bulk of the details to an event, so the author could reveal it at any time, but the "mystery" is just that the author is saving it to build and craft a moment to hit the reader as an impetus to take a relationship through to a climax. It all feels very intentional.
That said, the descriptive detail of how the character builds and executes his skill as a boxman, and his technique in the zone, rivals some of the better moments of how the main character in Perfume is overtaken by scents. But there's a lot of description of resetting dials and pins, that while novel at first, do start to feel a little worn thin by the end.
Nothing about the book didn't make me want to quit, but if I didn't know how it ended, I'm not sure how much I would have cared. It pretty much just does the stuff you expect it to do. It was worth finishing once I started, but I did read a couple of books in the middle of reading this, just because I was more excited by them.
But, I don't know, it's played really straight. For me it felt like it all follows this prescriptive plot on rails to guide the reader through all the plot points. A boy gets sucked into a life of crime because of his lock picking skills. There aren't any twists. And there wasn't a lot of real mystery. When I say real mystery, the main character has a secret, but really it's mostly a secret from the reader. The public in the book knows the bulk of the details to an event, so the author could reveal it at any time, but the "mystery" is just that the author is saving it to build and craft a moment to hit the reader as an impetus to take a relationship through to a climax. It all feels very intentional.
That said, the descriptive detail of how the character builds and executes his skill as a boxman, and his technique in the zone, rivals some of the better moments of how the main character in Perfume is overtaken by scents. But there's a lot of description of resetting dials and pins, that while novel at first, do start to feel a little worn thin by the end.
Nothing about the book didn't make me want to quit, but if I didn't know how it ended, I'm not sure how much I would have cared. It pretty much just does the stuff you expect it to do. It was worth finishing once I started, but I did read a couple of books in the middle of reading this, just because I was more excited by them.