Descripción
Libro Critical mass. Jocelyn «Joss» Cole, a burned-out public defender from L.A., has opted for a quieter life in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. Joss has no significant clients other than a group of commercial fisherman suffering from a strange and serious illness, a condition that doctors cannot diagnose, and which Joss believes has an industrial cause. Then into her office comes Dean Belden, a well-heeled client in search of a lawyer to help him set up a business in the islands. Within days Belden is subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury. Less than an hour after testifying, and before Joss can discover what happened in the secrecy of the grand jury room, Belden dies in a fiery explosion of his float plane on Seattle’s Lake Union Libro Critical mass.
Johan –
Written in 1998, this is Martini’s take on ‘terrorists bring a nuke to America.’ Every thriller writer has one of these; this one is interesting, but poorly structured. Jocelyn, a smart, sassy lawyer scraping by in a backwater of Oregon, meets a charming, handsome man who piles cash on her with a vague story about building a factory. She’s so sharp and cynical, but she doesn’t really check him out. Did they have the internet in 1997? Even if they didn’t, they had Dunn & Bradstreet, and they had credit bureaus. Turns out, the reason Jocelyn has been retained is to provide a way of dragging her into the story.
The writing is nothing but sloppy. We jump around in different POVs, sometimes without warning or signal. I stop, go back a couple of paras, reread, try to spot where we changed views. We don’t really get to know the characters, good or bad. Backstory is provided, but it just feels like filler. The bad guys are simplistically bad, the good guys are dedicated, for some reason. The plot plays out with good action, providing excuses for shootings, chases, explosions. All of which have the feel of being staged for the reader–it’s too early to catch the bad guys, so this time the good guys miss.