The Lion by Nelson DeMille
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Trying to rate these books sometimes requires too much mental work. I really liked the voice of the narrator, his humour, his personality, but I found the repetitive violence soooooo tedious. They say it’s an action book, but I actually found the action flagged. The waiting parts made sense, but unfortunately the conversations and thought processes during the waiting parts kind of got rather predictable and so created no tension, which dialogue and inner thought can do when physical action is not appropriate to the story at that point in it.
And then there’s the problem with violence: it’s addictive like a drug, with all the downsides of building up a tolerance. You take a bit, you get a high, you feel good, you get low, you want more. But the bit is not enough and you don’t get a high now. You want more. You get more, you get a high, you feel good, you get low. You want more and you want it even more violent. And so it goes. The same addiction cycle is the same for reader and author. Plus I find violence kind of simplistic. I mean, isn’t there ANY OTHER WAY?!! Would it kill an author to surprise me one day? Apparently so.
So to sum up: great main character, wonderful humour, repetitive plot whose solution you see coming in chapter 1, and violence that gets boring. Sigh.
I won this book as one of ten in a Twitter contest The Crime Vault held early in 2013.
