End Game Book Review

If you like books and reading them, there is a place where you can go and get books that are free to read and all you have to do is to promise to do a review of the book. Generally authors like to get a review of their book because it helps them to promote the book and hopefully get more sales. I suppose authors will wish that because they are giving the book away for free that they will get a sympathetic review of the book and with me being a bit of a writer I can fully understand that. On the other hand, I don’t think it does any favours to do a whitewash and tell lies. I think it is probably better to give constructive criticism that might just help the author out.

This is the second book that I have got from Story Cartel for reading and reviewing and with the first one I was quite happy to put a review on Amazon. The book was a decent enough read and did what it was supposed to do with getting me, the reader engaged and wanting to find out what happened in the story. This latest book called Endgame is somewhat different for me. So instead of putting the review in a more public place, i.e. on Amazon, I’m just going to put here on my own personal blog. I know how difficult it is to write a novel. Apart from the story, the plot and the building of the character arc from the start to the finish, there are a whole lot of things to think about such as grammar, style and readability. As you can see from this review I think that there are a lot of problems that need resolving with this novel by Bob Rueff.

Endgame

I am really struggling with this book, the first chapter was terrible. After the hook of the murder which is the main start of the book the rest of the chapter was all about the advertising industry and was really boring. I persevered with the book anyway, but I’d got as far as chapter 12 and still nothing happened. Here we are treated to a complete history of the character who is the love interest, her past history of love and life seems to be a waste of words.

A couple of chapters later and the writer is actually telling us that nothing has happened and I’m losing the will to live.
The writer is giving a background history into all of the family of the detective, details about a different crime that has been unsolved for some time and still nothing is going on with the story that started and was abandoned many chapters ago. The pace of the book is all wrong for a murder detective novel and even some of the words used just don’t seem to fit. Why would you use the word soubriquet rather than the word nickname in a book like this?

The book needs a complete rewrite where the author is showing rather than telling. There are huge amounts of writing where it is just an information dump and you really can’t be sure whether it has any relevance to the story.

I don’t really want to read any more of the story, but I might just to see if it can get any worse. After writing this review actually went to Amazon to look at the page for the book and it seems I’m not the only one to think that there is far too much information dumping. One of the other reviewers was unable to get past chapter six.