FC2_BLOG_TOP

Flawed Mediocre Debut

Initially I thought Perez was on the right track. It is, with rare exeception, absolutely necessary for Mystery/Crime/Thrillers to be written in the third person. With the narrator doubling as protagonist and tripling as hero, a first person account mutes all of the thrills. We know the narrator cannot be killed during his/her deathly encounters or he/she cannot finish telling the story. So Perez gets that. He starts off writing in the third person, but there is absolutely no separate, independent character development of anyone other than protagaonist, Alex Chapa, a newspaper reporter. I do not remember reading a single paragraph without "Chapa this..." and "Chapa that...". After the first hundred pages you get pretty tired of reading "Chapa". There are at least 8-10 potentially great characters in this novel,including a serial killer, surviving victims, law enforcers, co-workers, girlfriends, witnesses, all whom have their own potential stories to tell, viewpoints to show and possible action scenes to live. But none of these characters ever really come to life on their own and we never learn enough about any of them to even care about their fates. All we get is Chapa, Chapa and more Chapa. Instead of "Killing Red" the book should have been titled, "Two Weeks in the Life of Alex Chapa". This method of one-dimensional story-telling makes it way too easy to predict the tale's outcome, which although told in the third person actually reads as if it is being told in first person. Additionally there is an interesting and absorbing mysterious subplot within this story about a death row inmate's upcoming execution and his influence or control on macabre events taking place outside of the prison. Influence or control which prisoners, especially ones on death row, cannot be expected to have. The mystery is a gigantic "how?". But the book ends without the mystery being solved. One or more identified or possibly unidentified characters had to have conspired with the story's villain. But when the final page is turned the reader is left with our hero Chapa's mission coming to a predictable end, yet we still do not know how the villain accomplished his misadventure or who his cohorts are. This is not simply a loose end left untied. A missing piece this big in a jigsaw puzzle and you would never be able to guess the picture. Sorry I can't be more specific but for those of you who will go on to read this book I do not want to give anything away. My recommendation, however, is to find a different read. Perez can write. He can also devise characters that could easily fit in a good thriller. He just does not know how to take advantage of his writing ability, make those characters come to life or tell his story in a way that thrills the reader. Even worse, he gave up on his own story, bringing it to an end before bringing it together.