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A review by tiggum
Due Justice by Diane Capri
1.0
Stupid, lazy, rich arseholes waste everyone's time.
This book is terrible. The protagonist is incredibly obnoxious, and her inability to put two and two together combined with her apparent inability to do the reasonable or sensible thing at any time serve only to pad the story out by making everything take longer than it should.
Everything about Willa is irritating. She seems to believe she's just a low-paid public servant, but she's clearly incredibly wealthy. She apparently has a job from which she basically can't be fired (American federal judges are appointed for life?), so she does a massively half-arsed job of it and barely even bothers showing up, then acts like her boss (or not her boss? I couldn't even tell) is the arsehole because, as far as I can tell, he'd like her to actually do her job.
She daydreams through trials, she behaves incredibly unprofessionally, and seems to spend more time playing golf than working. And she's incredibly dumb. Generally in a mystery the protagonist is supposed to figure things out, but Willa needs everything spelled out for her. For example, we learn that character A is being blackmailed. We learn that character A is making payments to character B. But Willa somehow fails to connect those two facts until character A flat out states that character B is the blackmailer.
Then there's the actual plot. It just goes around and around in circles, introducing a whole lot of irrelevant characters and trying to convince us that Willa is making progress when she clearly isn't. The obvious solutions are ignored until right near the end when it turns out that the big conspiracy angle Willa's been pursuing this whole time was bullshit and it was actually the more straightforward answer that any normal person would have been investigating right from the beginning.
The only reason the reader doesn't figure out the solution ahead of time is that the book deliberately keeps the evidence from you, first by having Willa just investigate obvious red herrings and generally waste time, and then by having Willa (as narrator) just leave information out. Like when she sees a photo that gives the whole thing away, but doesn't say who's in it. The reader at this point is thinking "Well, whoever's in that photo is the obvious suspect" but Willa doesn't actually figure that out until considerably later.
And finally there's all the inaccuracies. Apparently Capri is a former lawyer, but she seems to know less about the law than the average person. Hint: Not going to the police to say "My wildly unreliable friend implied to me that she might know the identity of that dead man who was discovered recently because of reasons she won't tell me." is not obstruction of justice, it's just called "not wasting the police's time."
And the ignorance doesn't end there, it extends to medicine (the placebo effect is not a new discovery and it doesn't mean you can cure all illnesses with your mind), even such simple things like computer file names - what program would you use to open files named rpt.dr1, rpt.dr2, cronin.pat and cronin.rup, do you think? Trick question, they're all text files for some reason.
In conclusion, this book has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Don't read it.
This book is terrible. The protagonist is incredibly obnoxious, and her inability to put two and two together combined with her apparent inability to do the reasonable or sensible thing at any time serve only to pad the story out by making everything take longer than it should.
Everything about Willa is irritating. She seems to believe she's just a low-paid public servant, but she's clearly incredibly wealthy. She apparently has a job from which she basically can't be fired (American federal judges are appointed for life?), so she does a massively half-arsed job of it and barely even bothers showing up, then acts like her boss (or not her boss? I couldn't even tell) is the arsehole because, as far as I can tell, he'd like her to actually do her job.
She daydreams through trials, she behaves incredibly unprofessionally, and seems to spend more time playing golf than working. And she's incredibly dumb. Generally in a mystery the protagonist is supposed to figure things out, but Willa needs everything spelled out for her. For example, we learn that character A is being blackmailed. We learn that character A is making payments to character B. But Willa somehow fails to connect those two facts until character A flat out states that character B is the blackmailer.
Then there's the actual plot. It just goes around and around in circles, introducing a whole lot of irrelevant characters and trying to convince us that Willa is making progress when she clearly isn't. The obvious solutions are ignored until right near the end when it turns out that the big conspiracy angle Willa's been pursuing this whole time was bullshit and it was actually the more straightforward answer that any normal person would have been investigating right from the beginning.
The only reason the reader doesn't figure out the solution ahead of time is that the book deliberately keeps the evidence from you, first by having Willa just investigate obvious red herrings and generally waste time, and then by having Willa (as narrator) just leave information out. Like when she sees a photo that gives the whole thing away, but doesn't say who's in it. The reader at this point is thinking "Well, whoever's in that photo is the obvious suspect" but Willa doesn't actually figure that out until considerably later.
And finally there's all the inaccuracies. Apparently Capri is a former lawyer, but she seems to know less about the law than the average person. Hint: Not going to the police to say "My wildly unreliable friend implied to me that she might know the identity of that dead man who was discovered recently because of reasons she won't tell me." is not obstruction of justice, it's just called "not wasting the police's time."
And the ignorance doesn't end there, it extends to medicine (the placebo effect is not a new discovery and it doesn't mean you can cure all illnesses with your mind), even such simple things like computer file names - what program would you use to open files named rpt.dr1, rpt.dr2, cronin.pat and cronin.rup, do you think? Trick question, they're all text files for some reason.
In conclusion, this book has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Don't read it.