Oblivion

It's always nice coming across crime thrillers where the author keeps the story moving without having to be sneaky and hold back too much information from the reader to maintain suspense. In this book, first person perspective provides all the smoke screen necessary to keep the reader guessing, because the private investigator, Nick, doesn't even know for sure if he himself is the criminal he is looking for, once he figures out he is even tracking a criminal. He isn't sure if he even has a client for most of the story. There are some fun twists in this story, and while I did still work out who the bad guys were before they were revealed, the solution was not obvious until fairly late in the story.

This book comes dangerously close to describing the inner workings of the mind of the middle-aged male.

That doesn't make it a great book, or even a particularly good one; but the passages describing self-doubt, anxiety (frankly, we're not all dealing with brain tumors, but we often act that way), the loss of a step (both physically and mentally) hew close to the emotional crux. The detective stuff? Guns, gals, motorcycles, murder, just a recognizable framework on which to hang the stuff that's valid. It's essentially a précis on human frailty, and as such is a more than worthwhile read.

So it’s not a bad book.
The writing is okay, but it’s also nothing to write home about.
Entertainment Weekly’s review of it is a certainly over the top:

"You know you're holding a first-rate thriller when you take it with you in the car to read at stoplights."
- Entertainment Weekly. Grade: A. (Jennifer Reese)

First of all, EW, if your need to read is that intense might I suggest that you take an alternate form of transportation from place to place? Secondly, if this book makes you want to read it a stoplights, I fear what would happen if you read something that was actually thrilling, or in fact, in any way exciting. Because this book is neither of those things. The guy from the LA Times must have been reading a different book than show more me, because, “exciting and out of the ordinary... full of funny, touching and alarming surprises...” is pretty much the opposite of how I would describe this book. show less

First, forget about inevitable comparisons to Memento...
Love this book! Completely caught up in Nick’s mind, absolutely sympathetic to his denial AND his obsession to solve the case. I REALLY wanted him to get better at the end. I even loved his totally improbably instant marriage to his nurse. Who knows? Maybe that’s what people do when they have tumors.

Detective Nick Petrov is an engaging character from the first page. We watch as he commits perjury to seal the deal in court, treats the people around him like dirt and goes on his smart, abrasive way to solve the next crime. As the story progresses and Nick deals with his memory loss we see him change drastically from a vibrant, angry man to one that is clingiing to hope and life by a thread. Read The Rest Of This Review: [http://books.bgwe.org/?p=12]

Another Memphis airport buy, this is a thriller that everyone was raving about a while back—"Entertainment Weekly" gave it an A+, etc. Maybe I’m just a cranky bitch, but I don’t see why. Admittedly, Abrahams treatment of amnesia—a central plot point—was *really* well done; other writers could learn a thing or two from his descriptions of Nick Petrov’s post-accident confusion. Yet it’s frustrating, because I think we’re supposed to be as shaken as Nick is about how this has changed him, changed his personality, but we can’t be, because pre-accident Petrov is too much of a cypher. Further, the central mystery was unsatisfying to me, mainly because I knew who the villain was going to be very early on (the character has show more almost no other role in the narrative; ergo…), and even the exposure of that character’s motivation didn’t much interest me—it was too pat, too old hat. And *then*, Abrahams has to tack a “happy ending” onto the end. Or, a bittersweet one, anyway, but it was way too sudden and too neat. Oh, he gets the girl! Great, except she has almost no personality and their relationship was barely developed. Sigh.

All this makes it sound like I really hated this book; I didn’t, at least not while I was reading it—in fact I was pretty entertained. But man, those were some empty calories and now I have indigestion. show less

It was a unique concept of a detective who is dealing with medical issues and having to re investigate that which he had already solved. Not exactly realistic, but a different take on the same ole detective story.