Stephen Hayes reviewed The Promised Land by David Hewson
None
3 stars
An ex-cop accused of murdering his wife and child sends twenty-three years in prison under a death sentence. but cannot remember what he is supposed to have done. At the last minute he is released in strange circumstances, He soon discovered that he was not released because the judicial system has finally been persuaded of his innocence, but because different powerful groups think that being free will jog his memory about something they want, but they will not tell him what it is.
After going on the run, he decides to engineer a confrontation between different groups of his pursuers, a rather improbable aim, and the means he chooses to try to achieve it seem even more improbable. There are too many contrived plot twists where the author, like a clumsy stage magician tries his hand at misdirection, and all it does is take the reader back to the beginning …
An ex-cop accused of murdering his wife and child sends twenty-three years in prison under a death sentence. but cannot remember what he is supposed to have done. At the last minute he is released in strange circumstances, He soon discovered that he was not released because the judicial system has finally been persuaded of his innocence, but because different powerful groups think that being free will jog his memory about something they want, but they will not tell him what it is.
After going on the run, he decides to engineer a confrontation between different groups of his pursuers, a rather improbable aim, and the means he chooses to try to achieve it seem even more improbable. There are too many contrived plot twists where the author, like a clumsy stage magician tries his hand at misdirection, and all it does is take the reader back to the beginning of the paragraph to see where it is really going. That soon becomes very tiresome.
The best part was a description of a Starbucks coffee shop, as seen by someone who has been out of circulation for two decades in jail. I've never been inside a Starbucks coffee shop, so I'm not sure what it's like, but I have been to the Seattle Coffee Company, which hangs around Exclus1ve Bookshops, and I imagine Starbucks is somewhat similar.
I have no idea what a double skinny latte mocha with a tangerine shot or something is. But coffee it is not. I sat in this smoke-free, squeaky-clean, sanitized dump on Humboldt, squeezed between a launderette and what looked like an appealing book store. feeling I'd wandered into some adolescent's dream of what grown-up life ought to be like.
There were cushions of many colours, meaningless paintings on the wall, soft unmemorable music, and cups the size of Bavarian bierkeller mugs. Most people seemed to be sipping on gallons of warm sweet milk while chewing tiny fancy biscuits that cost the price of a meal the last time I had walked down Humboldt. In between sucks they played around with little computers on their laps, spoke on their tiny phones, and even, in a couple of rare misfit cases, read something that had once been a tree.
The setting was also weird. What country is not in Europe. has trams in the streets, and has capital punishment by lethal injection?