The Bookwoman’s Last Fling – John Dunning
From an intensely likeable hero in Jack Reacher, I then turned to a significantly less likeable hero in Cliff Janeway. I picked up The Bookwoman’s Last Fling because the blurb on the back sounded intriguing – a crime, to do with books and with horses – two things I absolutely love. When I started reading I wondered what could go wrong? I soon found out.
The main character of this book – or series of books, as I am led to believe – is a man with a pretty abrasive personality. I don’t think I have ever read a book where the main character managed to anger so many people. But he did it in a way that created arguments and unpleasantness. The result was several slightly artificial but nevertheless unpleasant. Can one man really have such an effect? Particularly when he first met his new ‘employer’, Junior Willis. Within several hours he had managed to hack Willis off so much that when Janeway threatened to leave without taking the job, Willis never stopped him and never really came back. The author explained it away by saying that Willis had a bad temper. Perhaps politeness in society is different in Idaho, but that just didn’t ring true.
Characters were picked up, developed to a point, and then just as quickly dropped again. Janeway’s fickleness when it came to suspects was highlighted by how thinly the author tried to point the fingerat one person after another (not very convincingly, unfortunately). Granted, I didn’t pick who was to blame until later in the book, but the guilty party had been introduced quite awkwardly earlier in the book so that when it turned out that it was that person who did it, I felt pretty unsatisfied.
The biggest problem with this book was that it just didn’t flow. It was like a series of hiccups with a bit of harmony in between. I can see what the author was trying to do and I liked the fact that he tried to do something a bit different with the subject matter, but it just didn’t work for me. I want to find out a bit more about the difference between a bibliophile and a bibliomaniac (it wasn’t a distinction I had ever heard of, so one good thing is my curiosity has been piqued) but I just couldn’t buy it. I couldn’t buy the fact that everyone had been in love with the ‘bookwoman’ of the title, and I couldn’t buy the fact that Janeway managed to make his way into the racing circuit without so much as a hitch. I couldn’t buy the amount of time his girlfriend, Erin, spent on the case when she was supposed to be a lawyer, and I struggled with his career change and indecision. Basically I found Janeway arrogant and blundering in a not particularly nice way. I gave it a go, but I won’t read another one of these. They weren’t for me.
Rating: 4/10
ISBN: 0-7318-1307-3
Publisher: Scribner
Year: 2006
Date finished: 6th January 2010
Pages: 337
