Nick Leary, a rich businessman who makes most of his money with shady deals and who doesn’t shrink back from using violence to get what he wants, is one night woken by strange noises in his home. When he discovers an intruder with a gun he attacks him with a baseball bat. The intruder is discovered to be a local teen and small-time criminal who dies a few days later in the hospital.
This is such a dumb book that I can hardly believe it. First of all, it is outrageously repetitive. As a reader you’re hit over the head with every single trait and quirk of the characters again and again like you’re too stupid to understand them the first time they are mentioned or explained. Nick’s wife, for instance, tries to fill the emptiness in her life by spending money, sleeping around, and drinking. We get it pretty quickly because the expensive lunches she throws for her friends are described in detail, her affairs come up frequently, she constantly drinks, she is frustrated because her husband won’t sleep with her, yadda yadda yadda. She is not interesting, she is a cliché, and everything about her could have been explained in a quarter of the words. There is also the intruder’s mother who is a heroin addict that does not give a damn about anyone, not even her dead teenage son, except that she panics because the one who provided her with drugs and took care of her is gone. There is nothing complicated about her character, but the author still sees the need to explain it through numerous scenes showing her manipulative addict ways. I swear I sometimes thought that I was reading the same twenty pages over and over again. This is a 500 page book that could have easily lost a third of its volume without any problem, maybe even more.
Then there’s the plot, and it’s just dumb. Nick, a man who has used violence all his life to get where he is and who is still not above killing people when they get in his way, is so torn up over beating someone to death who broke into his house with a loaded gun that he can’t get back on track again. He starts using cocaine so heavily that he makes one mistake after the other, and everything he grafted for his whole life is in danger because of that. I hate when characters make no sense because they are solely written to fit the plot, and Nick is not the only one that happens to in this book. Of course, there is a big reveal at the end, but it also does not make all this fit together any better.
Overall, this is just one of these books that made me mad at the end after almost boring me to death beforehand. There is a ton of filler instead of some kind of compelling build-up, and then you are hit with a big shocker that is apparently intended to make you forget all the inanity that came before. None of the characters are likeable or even interesting because they just don’t make any sense or are just cookie-cutter, and the plot is utterly forgettable. Perhaps the author was as bored by this story as I was, and thus did not give a damn about making it coherent or engaging in any way.