The Poacher's Son, by Paul Doiron

The Poacher's Son was good but not great.  It had good structure, characters and concept.  The writing style was well done and the scene construction was fine.  Perhaps what kept it from being great for me was the theme.  The book didn't add up to much except for the son realizing his father was a scum bag.  The main character made lots of poor choices in the book based on his belief that his father was a good man despite many bad traits.  His confidence in his father was misplaced in the end, but then all of his bad decisions didn't have any big repercussions which made the plot lose a lot of impact for me.

Overall, I liked this book and I'm glad I read it.  But as happens often when I read a book that doesn't quite make it to greatness, I like to try to figure out why.

Bait and Switch, by Larry Brooks

Bait and Switch is a book by my favorite writing blogger, Larry Brooks.  Unfortunately, I didn't like the book although it's hard for me to put my finger on exactly why.  It seems there were a lot of little things that didn't quite work and they all added up to a disappointing experience.  For example:

• The set-up got me prepared for the protagonist to seduce a billionaire's wife, but the middle of the book spent very little time on the actual seduction.  The title could also apply to what the author did to the reader.

• The main character seemed superficial at times and some of the excerpts at the beginnings of the chapters were cliched and distracting from the story.
• The ending twists and turns were not set up well enough and were confusing to try to follow.  I think the author tried to do too much.
• It was hard to root for the protagonist because he was being dishonest and we also didn't care enough about him or the stakes to care much what happened to him.

None of these things are fatal flaws, and none of them get to the main problem of why I didn't like the book.  Maybe it's that none of the characters seemed realistic.  The word superficial keeps coming back to me.  The author never got me into the book so that I felt like I was inside of the fictitious world along with the characters.  I always felt that I was observing characters that a writer dreamed up and who was working too hard to convince me they were interesting.