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A review by hemloc
The Last 10 Seconds by Simon Kernick
1.0
Three reasons to read The Last 10 Seconds:
1) I enjoy this style of storytelling that begins at the end and then skips back to the beginning. It works especially well with the crime genre.
2) The procedural side of the story is well-researched, as are the action scenes, which are well-thought-out and believable.
3) It does a decent job of creating intellectual curiosity and making readers read on just to see how it plays out.
Six drawbacks to The Last 10 Seconds:
1) I don't know if it's the crime genre in general or just the books I've read, but the writing is so bland. No wonderful descriptions, no great turns of phrase, no life to any of the scenes. "Derval looked utterly shocked" – that's how most of it is written: basic information that forces readers to do all the work of figuring out exactly how this character must look.
2) The dialogue is awful, repetitive, and unrealistic.
3) The author wants his main characters to be mavericks. They try very hard to be cool while pretending they don't try at all. They're the only ones who see things clearly; others insist it's all a coincidence and not worth looking into. If the only way you can make your characters seem competent is by making everyone else incompetent, you've already lost.
4) The bad guys are cardboard cutouts. There's no character development anywhere, and I have zero emotional attachment to any of them. They could all die horribly, and I wouldn't care.
5) The methods used to increase tension are cheap: lights going out to hide an attacker's identity for a few extra pages, ending chapters on cliffhangers that miss the mark (e.g. "Kent (...) looked up at me (...) and said something very strange indeed."), a scene that was supposed to last 30 seconds taking up 3 or 4 chapters because the author wanted to switch back and forth between POVs, etc.
6) If the only way the author found to make the crime interesting and unexpected was to make it convoluted, unrealistic, and unreasonable, perhaps crime fiction was not the best genre for him.
1) I enjoy this style of storytelling that begins at the end and then skips back to the beginning. It works especially well with the crime genre.
2) The procedural side of the story is well-researched, as are the action scenes, which are well-thought-out and believable.
3) It does a decent job of creating intellectual curiosity and making readers read on just to see how it plays out.
Six drawbacks to The Last 10 Seconds:
1) I don't know if it's the crime genre in general or just the books I've read, but the writing is so bland. No wonderful descriptions, no great turns of phrase, no life to any of the scenes. "Derval looked utterly shocked" – that's how most of it is written: basic information that forces readers to do all the work of figuring out exactly how this character must look.
2) The dialogue is awful, repetitive, and unrealistic.
3) The author wants his main characters to be mavericks. They try very hard to be cool while pretending they don't try at all. They're the only ones who see things clearly; others insist it's all a coincidence and not worth looking into. If the only way you can make your characters seem competent is by making everyone else incompetent, you've already lost.
4) The bad guys are cardboard cutouts. There's no character development anywhere, and I have zero emotional attachment to any of them. They could all die horribly, and I wouldn't care.
5) The methods used to increase tension are cheap: lights going out to hide an attacker's identity for a few extra pages, ending chapters on cliffhangers that miss the mark (e.g. "Kent (...) looked up at me (...) and said something very strange indeed."), a scene that was supposed to last 30 seconds taking up 3 or 4 chapters because the author wanted to switch back and forth between POVs, etc.
6) If the only way the author found to make the crime interesting and unexpected was to make it convoluted, unrealistic, and unreasonable, perhaps crime fiction was not the best genre for him.