Bad Company

“Bad Company” proved to be a bad read.

The potential was there for a great crime thriller, but thrills are sadly missing here. It lacks an engaging narrative and compelling characters. I won’t give the ending away but will state that it left me dissatisfied.

What irritated beyond everything else was the excessive number of adverbs. If, as the saying goes, “The road to Hell is paved with adverbs”, then that road first passes through this book.

This is worst of all in the dialogue attribution, where the author tries to use a different adverb every time a character speaks: “he said conversationally,” “she said angrily,” etc. It’s distracting to the point that come halfway through the book, I would wonder which adverb was coming up whenever a character began to speak.

A good writer should be able to *show* the characters' emotions with actions, not rely on adverbs to *tell* the reader about it. ( )

Really expands Anna's world by telling the story from the POV of her detective colleagues as well as herself. Defeats the expectations of the genre by not having the case all tidily wrapped up at the end. ( )