Louise Voss

I've not read a book with such terrible, despicable characters in a long time. I probably would have been ok with their awfulness as human beings if the situations they found themselves in and their reactions were in anyway believable but they weren't. My ability to suspend disbelief quit well before the halfway mark.

On the positive side, the narrators did a great job.

I'd give it a 1.5 stars because of the narration but my dislike of everything else forces the rounding down. Awful. *shudder*… (more)

The Venus Trap starts off with an incredible hook: Claudio, the spurned lover, is holding Jo, the object of his affection, hostage with the option of her either telling him she loves him, or he’ll kill her. Jo’s daughter is away with her father (Jo’s ex), leaving days for possible torture and suffering. The fact that her daughter will come home to this situation makes Jo’s captivity all the more tense.

In the days that follow, Claudio takes a mostly passive, but very personal path of inflicting torment on Jo via her past. He’s found her diary from when they were young (a time when Jo’s been sexually attacked), and when Claudio was never really on Jo’s radar. He reads her most personal thoughts, and forces Jo to read them to him. Things escalate from there, Claudio systematically destroying Jo’s past so that he can be her future.

Claudio is deluded, twisted, and lashes out in ways that makes the danger to Jo seem real.

Jo is a woman with very few options, but a lot of thinking to do. Reflecting on her past brings her to the realization that things may not be as over with her ex as she had once believed. Jo is undoubtedly confused (if not cursed) in love.

The novel starts strong, with a decisive voice that later wanders as Jo’s history is revealed through diary passages. The invasion of privacy angle worked in that it made Claudio seem all the more villainous. As an American reading British English, I was, at times, confused what the author was talking about. I read some British novelists, but this one had colloquial language I was unfamiliar with. It did hinder my enjoyment of this book that I didn’t fully understand the references. I didn’t realize it was British when I picked it up.

Overall, I would have liked a little more “thrill” from The Venus Trap. Jo’s singular attempt at escape was short-lived, and the most action in an otherwise slower paced thriller. I found myself wanting to skim read some of the diary passages, and found Jo to be somewhat unlikeable in that she left her husband for sex with another man (only to realize she did love her husband after all). She made a lot of poor choices, and Claudio seemed to be retribution for some of them. That being said, the premise of Jo (and the tension of her daughter coming home) kept me reading until the end. Three and a half stars.
… (more)