Scan barcode
A review by themanfromdelmonte
The Pearl King by Sarah Painter
4.0
End of Round One
I’ll start by saying that I enjoyed this book a lot and wouldn’t have written nearly as much in this review if I hadn’t. Hopefully that will take some of the sting out of it.
The author needs to make the narrative arc more consistent and what I mean by that is that, for example, in this book Uncle Charlie is a proper gangster in a way that he wasn’t in the first three. (This appears to come as news to Lydia.)
Next, where are the other members of the Crow family? Uncle Charlie can’t run things entirely on his own, he must have lieutenants and flunkies but we never meet them.
Then there are the other Families: Lydia has had a Fox boyfriend in the past but she appears to know only him and his dad. The rest of his family are all off stage somewhere.
She knows no Pearls and precious few Silvers, even though there’s an Family alliance with the latter.
The plot device to explain this is that Lydia’s parents have kept her away from the Family milieu but in the age of social media, this just isn’t plausible.
The on-off romance with DCI Fleet (AKA Peter Grant) is nice but where are the police the rest of the time?
The world the author paints (pun not intended) is not rich enough. Lydia simultaneously knows too much and too little and that jars.
I’ll start by saying that I enjoyed this book a lot and wouldn’t have written nearly as much in this review if I hadn’t. Hopefully that will take some of the sting out of it.
The author needs to make the narrative arc more consistent and what I mean by that is that, for example, in this book Uncle Charlie is a proper gangster in a way that he wasn’t in the first three. (This appears to come as news to Lydia.)
Next, where are the other members of the Crow family? Uncle Charlie can’t run things entirely on his own, he must have lieutenants and flunkies but we never meet them.
Then there are the other Families: Lydia has had a Fox boyfriend in the past but she appears to know only him and his dad. The rest of his family are all off stage somewhere.
She knows no Pearls and precious few Silvers, even though there’s an Family alliance with the latter.
The plot device to explain this is that Lydia’s parents have kept her away from the Family milieu but in the age of social media, this just isn’t plausible.
The on-off romance with DCI Fleet (AKA Peter Grant) is nice but where are the police the rest of the time?
The world the author paints (pun not intended) is not rich enough. Lydia simultaneously knows too much and too little and that jars.