Title: Pigeon – Blood Red
Author: Ed Duncan
Release date: February 25th, 2016
Publisher: Self published through Smashwords
Rating: 2/5 stars
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book by the author and publicist Kelsey Butts in exchange for an honest review. This will in no way affect my opinion of the book.
Summary:
For this review I am going to do something I usually try to avoid, and that is use the summary on the back of the book. But in this particular case I actually have no idea how to properly describe what this book is about, so here it goes:
After an unfaithful husband and his lover try to double-cross a loan shark, they endanger the lives of the man’s unsuspecting wife and an old flame who comes to her rescue. Pursued by a ‘killer with a conscience’, the wife and her newly found protector must decide what to do with a stolen ruby necklace worth millions. And their pursuer must decide what to do with them: murder them as ordered — although one of them saved his life — or refuse and risk the life of the women he loves.
Characters:
Our ‘main character’ (I will call him the main character just because the Goodreads page describes him as such but I actually couldn’t point out one particular main character) is Rico who is basically a loan shark’s hitman. He is described as a ‘killer with a conscience’ but I just found him fucking annoying. The only conscience I saw from him was at the very end. I couldn’t really sympathise with anything going on with him.
Evelyn was definitely my favourite character. I found her to be a very strong female character who stood up to her cheating husband. She was enjoyable to read about and her actions were understandable.
Robert is Evelyn’s husband and I thought he was an awful person! Please note that that doesn’t necessarily mean I found him to be a bad character. I thought he was reasonably realistic.
Besides Evelyn I really liked Litvak he is our story’s villain and I loved to hate him. Of course he frustrated me at times but that was clearly how I was supposed to feel, so I thought that character was well done.
Likes:
I know I am being quite negative about this book but there were also things I did enjoy things about this book. I found Evelyn as a character quite enjoyable. She was strong and nice to read about. I could connect with her on some level and I actually understood why she did the things she did.
The only other thing I enjoyed was Litvak, our trusty old loan shark. He was a good villain in my opinion. Duncan did not try and make him likeable and give him redeeming qualities. I really appreciated that.
Other than that I don’t really know what to say, some of the passages were well-written. But none of them stood out so much that it made up for the annoyances that I stumbled upon throughout the book.
Dislikes:
I am not going to lie, I had quite a few problems with this book. And I feel like most of them could easily have been fixed by an editor. For example, there were no paragraph breaks when changing location, time, or perspective. This made the book very confusing to read and quite frankly made me want to put down the book and not pick it up again. The only reason I put up with it was because I got sent a copy of this book to write a review.
This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that there was no clear main character. Duncan keeps jumping from character to character, writing from different perspectives sometimes multiple times on a single page. I understand that the writer wants to show the reader the inner workings of all character’s brains, so that the mystery can be solved through all the puzzle pieces, but I felt like there was a lot left to be desired on that front.
Final thoughts:
The reviews on Goodreads are pretty positive overall so maybe it’s just the fact that I am generally not the biggest fan of crime novels. But I just think that absolutely nothing happened. There was little to no excitement. No cliffhangers. Nothing that made me want to turn the page other than the fact that I got this book for review and felt obligated to give a review. I felt like this book has not been edited properly and I think I would have liked it a whole lot more had it not been for the writing style. I don’t like telling people to not read a certain book, so I won’t. But I do want to say that if you’re not the biggest mystery / crime reader to begin with, maybe don’t start with this one.
Lots of Love,
Lotte
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