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A review by mnboyer
If She Wakes by Michael Koryta
3.0
A young college student, Tara, is tasked with picking up prominent guest lecturers and chauffeuring them to their destinations. It sounds easy enough, but her most recent pick-up is slowing things down, wants to go a different direction, and eventually is out of the car taking photos on his phone. A few minutes later, the professor has been hit by a car and Tara has been propelled through the air, smashing her skull. Left for dead, she awakens in the hospital only to find out she's suffering from "trapped in syndrome" -- she looks like she's in a coma, but Tara can actually hear everything going on around her. She just can't 'wake up' like she wants to.
The college sends in an investigator to, you know, cover their own butts and make sure they don't get sued. Abby is sent in to look in on the details of the accident but stumbles into a multi-character plot involving assassins, thugs, etc. It gets a little convoluted for me as more and more characters are introduced--some of them, of course, are killed off, and others aren't important--but it just gets a little complicated and a little more "thug" than I thought it was going to get. At moments it gets far fetched. Our main killer extraordinaire is Dax. Apparently, he is the son of two also extraordinary killers. So there's like...hit-man royalty if you will and Dax was destined for greatness from a young age. *insert my eye roll here as this was silly and not needed*
To be honest, I was expecting more. I was very much interested in the first few pages, but the more viewpoints that were added, and the more people that kept entering the plot... well, it started to lag for me. A dear friend of mine promises me that Michael Koryta is actually a great writer and that this isn't his best work, so I'll listen to that promise and will pick up a different book from Koryta before I make any judgments on his writing as a whole. This book just needed to be pared down and tightened up for me to love it. Overall, I left feeling it was "okay".
The college sends in an investigator to, you know, cover their own butts and make sure they don't get sued. Abby is sent in to look in on the details of the accident but stumbles into a multi-character plot involving assassins, thugs, etc. It gets a little convoluted for me as more and more characters are introduced--some of them, of course, are killed off, and others aren't important--but it just gets a little complicated and a little more "thug" than I thought it was going to get. At moments it gets far fetched. Our main killer extraordinaire is Dax. Apparently, he is the son of two also extraordinary killers. So there's like...hit-man royalty if you will and Dax was destined for greatness from a young age. *insert my eye roll here as this was silly and not needed*
To be honest, I was expecting more. I was very much interested in the first few pages, but the more viewpoints that were added, and the more people that kept entering the plot... well, it started to lag for me. A dear friend of mine promises me that Michael Koryta is actually a great writer and that this isn't his best work, so I'll listen to that promise and will pick up a different book from Koryta before I make any judgments on his writing as a whole. This book just needed to be pared down and tightened up for me to love it. Overall, I left feeling it was "okay".