Sunday 29 June 2014

Black Lies, Red Blood by Kjell Eriksson

"You're different," said Ann Lindell.

This opening line is a perfect example of why it is not a good idea to begin with dialogue. Who is this person who is different? We don't know. We don't know how they were before, so the author, in order to answer this question this opening raises, will be forced to go into, alas, back story to explain it, which is to say, he's already digging a black plot hole right on page 1.

Then we get character description that fills up the rest of page 1. Andres Brant has trembling eyelids, he's not a powerful man and his face was thin and lacked strong lines, just to paraphrase some of the opening sentences of paragraphs on page 1.

Then we learn that the change has to do with the two having fallen in love, or thereabouts. Even though we are spared a massive back story dump, there is enough here to stall the forward narrative.

There really isn't much else to say about this opening, it yawns for itself. This author really has no idea how to begin a novel with a hook, as evidenced in this one and the previous book by him we reviewed. He needs to attend our exclusive 10,000,456.36 dollar HMB course.

On a positive note, the last book reviewed was an epic 1-star fail, whereas this one is a 1.5 fail, so he is, in a sense, improving.

As a bonus we have a title that is descriptively bland, as well.

Verdict: Yawn

Sincerely,
Rudy Globird

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