The Fort by Aric Davis
My rating: 4/5 cats
OH MY GOD I JUST REALIZED THIS WAS ON AN AMAZON IMPRINT.
I HAVE PLAYED INTO THEIR HANDS.
this is hovering between three and four stars cats for me. a lot of it depends on whether this is a YA book or not. i can’t quite figure it out. cover looks like it could be, it has young characters, the author’s profile says he writes “mystery & thrillers, young adult, horror.”
and if this is a YA book, it gets four stars cats for sheer balls, because it is rare to come across a YA book with a line like: When I catch her and get her back to the house, I’m going to beat the shit out of her, and I’m going to fuck her every which way but loose, especially in a book put out by people who delete book reviews that use the word “breast” when the reviewer is talking about “chicken breasts” in a cookbook review. and the ending…let’s just say it would be unusual to find that in a YA book, but not in an adult book.
if it is in fact a regular adult crime novel, i would give it three stars cats. but i know i will be too lazy to come back here and change it, so hooray for you—you get four stars cats.
a lot of the book explores lies. lies of omission, lies of convenience, self-protective lies, lies for financial gain, lies to avoid a fight. and it is interesting to see how things snowball, and how easily the snowballing could have been avoided. it is a neat little thought-exercise.
a couple of reader-quibbles: if you are going to go to all the trouble to discuss the significance of the bottle caps as a safety measure, a reader would expect that at some point, this would return as a plot point, in a scene where there would be a presence, but no bottle caps which would mean…you know. but it doesn’t, so the whole ritual is just a repeated detail that never foments into the chekhov-instilled expectations.
it also would have been nice to have had a moment where a post-police-station luke had an internal monologue where it became clear that he remembered what molly had been wearing, just to make his skipped interview even more unfortunate.
if you haven’t read the book, these quibbles make no sense, and i apologize.
guess you gotta go read this.
it’s good—it’s not the tightest crime thriller i have ever read, but it has a good sense of tension, and the action unfolds at a reasonable pace, and i do like young amateur sleuths.
also: excellent and very disgusting injury-description. so delightfully icky.
thumbs up for pus!
happy easter!
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