The greatest crime this book commits is not the clichés, the sexism, the glorification of cops or the supremely unlikable characters. It's that, despiThe greatest crime this book commits is not the clichés, the sexism, the glorification of cops or the supremely unlikable characters. It's that, despite all this, it's boring as hell.
Truly just a very tedious and longwinded affair. It ramps up somewhat in the second half (if you manage to make it that far, the first half is very dull), and the action is not bad, but it never had me on the edge of my seat. Mostly because the characters are flat and often obnoxious stereotypes. Brilliant Cop with a Sad Past. Beautiful Ex-Wife with a Flourishing Career (she's seriously described as "a fit woman who embraced her feminine features", whatever the hell that means). Cop Side Characters Who Mostly Do Sexist Banter. Evil Criminal Addicted to Drugs. Authority Figures Who Won't Listen to Reason.
Well, I picked up a book called Megalodon: Bloodbath, so I'm obviously not opposed to those things. It's just that Cole clearly doesn't himself think these characters suck ass. They're not parodies, although that would have worked better. They're stereotypes presented as people, but you never root for anyone, because you cannot bring yourself to care. There's nothing to care about. If it had been non-stop shark action no one would have noticed, but it's not. We spend so much fucking theme with these fucking ghosts of real characters before anything exciting happens.
They don't even know there's a shark for 40% of the book, and our time is instead filled mainly with "getting to know" our main characters (you'll wish you knew less as time goes on), and reading about random people's random lives just before they get vaguely eaten. And there's a dumb B-plot with some criminals that are portrayed as just Pure Evil, and yet we have to spend page after page seeing them do Bad Criminal Things and be Bad People Worthy of Death. Give me more shark!!
The real problem is that this book tries to be a serious book rooted in realism, but first of all, it's a book about a giant shark eating people, so what the hell are you doing that for, and second of all, Cole clearly is not a competent enough writer to sell it, and he's not incompetent enough to make this accidentally hilarious.
I never had any desire to read another page and yet I kept going. Fortunately (spoiler alert!), they manage to defeat the shark by making it eat 9 kilos of cocaine, so you know, that was something at least. Even if that was just after Brilliant Cop and Beautiful Ex-Wife got back together. Christ. ...more