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Mar 02, 2017chriscoleman rated this title 0.5 out of 5 stars
About a decade ago, Jonathan Kellerman's son Jesse attempted to start his own line of detective novels. It bombed big. So now he writes with his dad and produces novels like this stinker. The first few chapters take place in 2011 where a serial killer haunts the streets of Prague and attempts to take another, and misses. She gets away and she can identify him. This section is written in extremely awkward prose. I have no idea what really happened because there are too many metaphors and similes about muddy walls and other bizarre things that couldn't exist. Then suddenly we're in 2013 Los Angeles in the dingy apartment of a Jewish cop named Jacob Lev. He's an alcoholic and wakes up with a naked woman in his apartment with no idea how she got there. While he's in the shower, she disappears. He is then suddenly transferred to a "special" division where he is assigned a decapitation murder simply because the killer wrote "justice" in Hebrew on the wall. From there the story spends countless chapters reinventing the story of Cain and Abel. Only now it's told in present tense and they have a sister they both want to marry. When the sister Asha doesn't choose one of her brothers, their father Adam demands God choose from their offerings. What was really bizarre was the way the author goes from past tense third person telling the actual novel and then switches to present tense third person to tell the story of Cain and Abel. Awkward is an understatement. It's soooooo boring. And I couldn't but feel that the author made light of the story of Cain and Abel, putting a 21st century Valley Girl twist on it that is irreverent. Why take three different stories and try to make them work together? Apparently there is some hidden meaning I didn't grasp. The older Jonathan Kellerman books are okay to listen to on audio. This was terrible. I'll be sending all the newer ones back to the library, especially the ones written with his son Jesse. Now about the narrator since this was the audio book version. The narrator is John Rubenstein. He was an actor for years and then kind of disappeared. Throughout the narration, he will split verbs from their adverbs. For example, he'll say "he said", take a pause, then slowly say "painfully". Wth? This is worse than awkward; it makes no sense. Adverbs describe the verb; they don't go solo. Worst narration + awful novel = poor listening experience.