Warmth on the Wall?

I have now finished Richard Montanari's Broken Angels. The blurb on the back flap informs me that Mr Montanari has had books published in over 20 countries and is a Top Ten Sunday Times bestselling author. In so far as  this means he is not in desperate need of a new fan, this is good news, because  I am not destined to become one.

Mr Montanari has a simple style. Short sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters. This makes the book a quick-ish, if unchallenging read. He is also a great exponent of the 'tell not show' method of storytelling, which is OK if you're writing screenplays, not so great in a novel. For example, if I am supposed to believe a female character is feisty (and that's not a word I enjoy particularly) I expect a writer to find a more subtle way of letting me know this than making her an amateur boxer. This book is all like that; all surface, no depth.

Other grumbles.

The psychology of the perpetrator is unconvincing. A more skilful writer could have made this plausible,:Mr Montanari, not so much.

The near cheating of the denouement. The unwritten pact between writer and reader in this sort of book is that the person whodunnit shoud be deducible by an alert reader, and shouldn't be pulled by the writer like a rabbit from a hat in the last 10 pages of the book. And although we had met the perpetrator in this book there was no way the most alert reader on God's earth could have solved this one. Actually given the detail which finally leads to the feisty female identifying him,  if she'd been a bit more alert in the beginning he could have been caught very early on and saved us almost 400 pages of anodyne prose.

And finally one of the detectives has the occasioanl supernatural experience which supposedly helps, but as far as I could see did nothing but fill up the odd page, to no real purpose. At one point he smells pine needles and woodsmoke and has a feeling of evil approaching. I don't like the supernatural inserted into the police procedural , but if you're going to do it at least have some consistency. There is no follow up to this 'vision'; the scents of woodsmoke and pine needles do not re-appear, separately or in tandem, nor does it have any meaning within the plot.  The approach of evil I will allow, but given that the book is about a serial killer,  evil is a bit of a given.

Some of this I could have overlooked, but in fact a small detail on page 148 convinced me that I was never going to pick up another of this man's books. Let me quote the exact phrase that determined this decision: 'the wallpaper was a cheerful beige gingham'

Now this is obviously a definition of beige with which I have been previously  unaquainted. Honestly if you wanted a description of dull and uminaginative decor, could you do any better than beige, whether it were gingham-ed or not? Who, who in the world, apart from Mr M of course, would ever describe beige gingham wallpaper as cheerful?

On the plus side, since I would like to be seen as balanced, it is quite tense towrds the end, say the last 30 pages or so) and if I am ever in a quiz that requires the names of both Philadelphia rivers I am now equipped to get the point. So the hours I spent reading weren't all loss, then.