Book Review - "The Travelers" by Chris Pavone

I really need to dig out from beneath every damn thing since last week's trip for a signing to Minneapolis but I'm not there yet. I am trying, though, very hard. In the meantime, I agreed to do a book review and as a way of clearing that off my plate, here it is:

"The Travelers" by Chris Pavone

The good news is, I enjoyed the book itself a lot. The bad news is, I didn't enjoy reading it as much as I'd hoped. This is the first book I've read by Chris Pavone, and I'll probably try another, but what got me was that the present tense scenes are all very choppy, like it was targeted for readers with short attention spans. The sections can be quite short and usually end abruptly in places like, "Then the door opened." A new section is started and we have to wait to see who opened the door.

This in itself is not a bad thing. The problem here is the frequency in which it happens, which is just about through the entire book. It's a bit like watching a network TV show where more than a third of the show's time is allocated for commercials. As soon as my mind gets into the show, it's jerked out of the story by a commercial break. The show resumes, my mind is jerked out again.

The writing is okay; there's not a lot of flair in the language though there are a few witty metaphors. The dialogue is nothing special. It's the plot that keeps you interested, even though you'll probably figure out most of it in advance of the story. There are two cases where the manner in which the characters figures things out strain credulity--just thinking about something for a few seconds probably isn't enough--but the rest of the book worked much better.

So if you can put up with the short, very chopped up sections of the book, what you'll find is a mostly very enjoyable though slightly difficult to believe story that despite its faults, you'll often find difficult to put down.