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A review by lezreadalot
Cut & Run by Madeleine Urban, Abigail Roux
1.0
Man, I need to learn to distrust recs from the lists on this site. Or at least read the critical reviews of books before I read them. If I'd done so in this case, I'd have seen that this book is a smorgasbord of things I hate.
- Constantly switching POVs. If you're co-writing a book, then it does make sense to split POVs, but I thought that they would do it chapter by chapter? Or at least scene by scene? Instead, we're literally moving between these two characters between paragraphs, sometimes between sentences. Maybe if we weren't told what each of them were thinking the moment they thought it, this book might have stood a chance. As it stands... how in the world did this make it past an editor.
- Terrible, awful, no-good dialogue and the most forced banter I've ever seen in my life. Literally no one talks like that. Literally.
- Both main characters are unrepentant assholes with no personality. I'm pretty sure more time was spent on the shitty witticisms for Ty's t-shirts then the time that went into developing his character.
- In accordance with the rules for writing m/m that are apparently written in stone, mind-numbing misogyny. Female characters were reduced to 'raging bitches' that the two mains could band together to insult, or background characters, most of whom ended up dead by the end of the book.
- The flimsiest plot in the world, chock full of clichés and bad movie tropes. It didn't even have the decency to be a good murder-mystery; I figured out who the murderer was less than halfway through the book.
- “Only thing that’ll fix Miami is a fucking nuke.” / “If you got called papi more than once, then I want blood tests before I touch you again.” Charming.
If I hadn't promised myself that I wouldn't abandon any more books in 2014, I would have dropped this a quarter way in. I'm not usually this annoyed when I read bad books, lots of people write bad books, but I was told that this was going to be good (and I remember reading a novel by Roux that wasn't so bad), and I was lied to. The search for a queer murder mystery that isn't garbage goes on.
- Constantly switching POVs. If you're co-writing a book, then it does make sense to split POVs, but I thought that they would do it chapter by chapter? Or at least scene by scene? Instead, we're literally moving between these two characters between paragraphs, sometimes between sentences. Maybe if we weren't told what each of them were thinking the moment they thought it, this book might have stood a chance. As it stands... how in the world did this make it past an editor.
- Terrible, awful, no-good dialogue and the most forced banter I've ever seen in my life. Literally no one talks like that. Literally.
- Both main characters are unrepentant assholes with no personality. I'm pretty sure more time was spent on the shitty witticisms for Ty's t-shirts then the time that went into developing his character.
- In accordance with the rules for writing m/m that are apparently written in stone, mind-numbing misogyny. Female characters were reduced to 'raging bitches' that the two mains could band together to insult, or background characters, most of whom ended up dead by the end of the book.
- The flimsiest plot in the world, chock full of clichés and bad movie tropes. It didn't even have the decency to be a good murder-mystery; I figured out who the murderer was less than halfway through the book.
- “Only thing that’ll fix Miami is a fucking nuke.” / “If you got called papi more than once, then I want blood tests before I touch you again.” Charming.
If I hadn't promised myself that I wouldn't abandon any more books in 2014, I would have dropped this a quarter way in. I'm not usually this annoyed when I read bad books, lots of people write bad books, but I was told that this was going to be good (and I remember reading a novel by Roux that wasn't so bad), and I was lied to. The search for a queer murder mystery that isn't garbage goes on.