Pocket-47, by Jude Hardin

Pocket-47 was recommended by J. A. Konrath whose writing I like. Unfortunately, I did not like Hardin's writing. Sometimes the writing is clumsy, especially with the use of cliches, and this calls attention to the writer and takes the reader out of the story. The characters are also not very deep. We are allowed into the main character's head, but only just below the surface.

But the real problem with Pocket-47 is the structure. The first three-quarters of the book has the typical set-up, response, attack and semi-resolution, but then there's still a quarter of the book to go! The story then takes a three-month break and has the main character discovering that one of the bad guys is actually still alive. He proceeds to chase the bad guy into a white-supremacist military compound in order to expose them and their evil ways. But all the while this is happening we don't care because the girl from the first part is still dead.

It's very shocking to have to start a book all over again from the set-up stage when the reader is three-quarters of the way through. Hardin does tie the second story back to the first in the last several pages, but by that point we've given up caring. He has a few pages of exposition explaining how all the events were connected together--but we need to be figuring that out during the book, not at the end.

Perhaps Hardin thought he was doing something exciting with structure which would make his book more interesting. But for this reader, it backfired and made it more boring. Why is it so difficult to find a book with a standard structure which is well executed?