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A review by whatbritreads
Death of the Black Widow by James Patterson
3.0
I started off quite intrigued by this book. The opening chapters were short and snappy, and the characters we begin following interested me. It employs a dual timeline narrative which I always find engaging, so I was initially quite hopeful for the story. But after reading all 500+ pages of it, in the end I was extremely underwhelmed.
The writing was fine, it functioned as it needed to but was nothing special for me. The pacing was okay and it felt fairly consistent, as most of the chapters were quite short it did keep me turning pages pretty often. After a couple hundred pages or so though, this started to feel quite tired. I have no idea why this book was as long as it was, it felt wholly unnecessary. We could have wrapped it up several hundred pages beforehand if the middle wasn’t so repetitive. The characters ended up going in circles for a long while.
I do think the plot of this one was quite cool, and something I’ve never really seen broached much in crime fiction before (not that I read an awful lot of it) which I liked. Though if you read a lot of paranormal novels, this might be run of the mill for you. It started off very mysterious and unpredictable, but by the time you figure out exactly what's happening it still takes the characters another 200 pages to catch up which was equally frustrating and kind of dull to read.
The characters themselves had interesting backstories, but every male character read as the same person. We don’t have an overwhelming number of female characters in this book except the antagonist, and she was written terribly. I don’t know why the decision was made to give her absolutely no personality, and to be overtly sexual and inappropriate throughout the entire book. It was gross, and it became very apparent very quickly that two men penned this novel. She was so bland, her only trait was sex.
And for some reason near the end of the book, we have a wildcard. A random thrown in, rushed, nonsensical romance subplot. Entirely unnecessary, and very silly.
This was a book with a whole lot of potential, but it just kept letting itself down. If you edited half of it out and had better written characters, there might have been something more in here.
The writing was fine, it functioned as it needed to but was nothing special for me. The pacing was okay and it felt fairly consistent, as most of the chapters were quite short it did keep me turning pages pretty often. After a couple hundred pages or so though, this started to feel quite tired. I have no idea why this book was as long as it was, it felt wholly unnecessary. We could have wrapped it up several hundred pages beforehand if the middle wasn’t so repetitive. The characters ended up going in circles for a long while.
I do think the plot of this one was quite cool, and something I’ve never really seen broached much in crime fiction before (not that I read an awful lot of it) which I liked. Though if you read a lot of paranormal novels, this might be run of the mill for you. It started off very mysterious and unpredictable, but by the time you figure out exactly what's happening it still takes the characters another 200 pages to catch up which was equally frustrating and kind of dull to read.
The characters themselves had interesting backstories, but every male character read as the same person. We don’t have an overwhelming number of female characters in this book except the antagonist, and she was written terribly. I don’t know why the decision was made to give her absolutely no personality, and to be overtly sexual and inappropriate throughout the entire book. It was gross, and it became very apparent very quickly that two men penned this novel. She was so bland, her only trait was sex.
And for some reason near the end of the book, we have a wildcard. A random thrown in, rushed, nonsensical romance subplot. Entirely unnecessary, and very silly.
This was a book with a whole lot of potential, but it just kept letting itself down. If you edited half of it out and had better written characters, there might have been something more in here.