Stopped Reading REVIEW: Thriller

The Cleaner by Mark Dawson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I rarely stop reading books, especially if they have a good premise and an awesome cover. Dawson’s grammar is pretty good too, and the formatting is fine.

So why did I stop reading?

Well, I ran into a wall of needless exposition 10% into the Kindle e-book.

The story was gearing up pretty good, protagonist gets second thoughts about his job, doesn’t shoot a young witness, gets dressed down by his superior and quits.

All is well up to this point, but then, when the protagonist has gone, his superior pulls out the protagonist’s human resources file and starts going over what should be familiar knowledge to the superior, resulting in several pages delving into the protagonist’s back story with all the charm of reading someone’s job application resume.

Why? Why ruin the pace with this clunky exposition?

I see this often happen in mediocre books and shows, where the author/director assumes the audience are morons who have to be spoon-fed information they cannot glean from the protagonist’s actions. And the fact is that the audience (readers/viewers) are way more intelligent than they get credit for.

I’m sorry to give this book a 1-star rating, but I can’t abide lazy writing. I don’t need a protagonist’s resume, I need them to be interesting. I don’t want to run into a wall of exposition that drags down the pace to a standstill, I want to read what’s going to happen next. John Milton sounded interesting until I got too much information in the worst way possible.

Too bad. Great cover, great premise, good formatting, lazy writing.

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