Oh boy!
I read Twilight a few years ago, way after
everyone else did, and it was really rather good, good enough to get me through
the series at least, (books three and four were like wading through treacle).
Then, I read, The Host, and after the first hundred pages or so, I got really
bored - which is how I felt whilst reading, the Chemist.
Alex (the main character), used to work
for a secret government organisation, where she was their top torturer, their
'Chemist', but when they tried to bump her off, she had to go undercover, deep,
deep, deep undercover.
A few years later and her former boss
offers her a job, which she believes is a trap, but when she learns that
millions of people might die if a certain school teacher, Daniel, isn't
intercepted, and if necessary, tortured for information, she reluctantly
accepts.
So far, so good. Fast paced and
believable, but then it all starts going rapidly downhill.
After Alex has brutalised Daniel with her
excruciating cocktail of barbiturates, his brother (who is supposed to be
dead), attempts a rescue, which fails, so Alex has them both at her mercy and
the truth is revealed. There is no plot to kill millions, Daniel is
innocent; he also happens to be an identical twin! So, is it the brother, Kevin,
the government wants, Alex, or both?
If it wasn't for Daniel inexplicably
falling in love with his torturer, about five pages after she's tried to kill
him, we might have found out a little sooner, but as it stands, we have to
spend the next two hundred and fifty pages, (half of the book), holed up in a
remote ranch, talking about dogs, food, and how much Daniel loves the woman
he's only know for a few days!!!
It's just really weird!
Their relationship is the sort of thing
you'd expect in a YA/teen novel - vampires or not - but here it's just silly,
and to top it all, the dialogue between them is pathetic. It never once felt
like they were having a realistic conversation, it was like watching a low
budget movie with a naff script.
The good bits: The action is fast paced,
and when it comes, it moves the story along nicely. Val, (Kevin's high end
prostitute friend), turns out to be the most believable character in this whole
charade, (even though she seems to be richer that Bill Gates), but in the end,
the bad outweighs the good.
I know that millions of copies of this
book will have been sold already, and maybe others will like it more than me,
but, after, The Host, the last two books in the Twilight series and this, I
think I'll leave Stephenie Meyer's books in the bookshop from now on.
Unimpressed. Two stars.
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