Crashers

For the first 50 or so pages, I was really regretting requesting this book. It was starting up slow, and not starting with the Crashers - and they're who I'm here to read about. Throughout the book, the descriptions of the techno-jerk and his equipment are somewhere between over-the-top stereotype and badly guessed geek info. Less detail would have been better than wrong detail. (Somewhat similarly, every time the author described women's clothing by designer, I was jarred out of the book. That's not the sort of info that you can assume that all thriller readers know off hand.) [return][return]BUT, when things pick up, and our actual main characters appear, the book gets much better. Odd quirks of humor, fast moving plot, enjoyable dialogue - once we have the cast all put together, things move and I developed enough interest that the book became hard to put down. [return][return]There's a lot more people and complications involved that I would have expected from a book supposedly about Crashers - it's almost more about the FBI involvement. It's a good story once it gets going, but I'd love to actually read a book focused on the NTSB investigators. [return][return]Still, I give it 4 stars because the second half of the book has just the right tone and tempo for this genre. (Minus the jarring scenes with the geek.)

The most laudable thing that can be said about Crashers is that it's fun. And it definitely is that -- lazy brain candy on a Saturday afternoon/Law and Order marathon sort of fun. It's fast-paced romp, with lots of action, a plot-twist or two and lots of beautiful, charismatic characters.

And that's where the praise ends. This reads like a script for a summer movie or a CSI "Special Episode." It is filled with an appropriately diverse cast (for some, unknown, reason the ethnic background of even the most trivial of characters is given. While the supporting cast contains a Korean man, three African Americans, a Brit, an Israeli, a handful of Irish men, an Arab American and an Asian American, the main cast is white -- very TV.) More time is spent describing how beautiful, handsome, rugged and sexy each character is than really giving any personality, which makes it difficult to tell who's talking without dialogue tags.

The action is really designed to be cinematic. I had a lot of fun picturing in my head how the scenes would look, but there aren't really any twists to engage the imagination of the reader.

But, where the Crashers really falls down is the writing. As I said, the plot is fun, the characters are pretty, there's lots of action, overall it would be about as enjoyable as a weak Dan Brown novel, if not for the terrible writing. To be fair, I received an advance copy, which I assume (from the number of typos) is still undergoing some editing. That being said, the dangling participles, heavy handed dialogue-tagging and awkward exposition and narration were so distracting that finishing the book was a chore that I completed because I got the book from First Reads. Had I bought the book, I probably would have given up on it.