Saturday, March 31, 2018

Warning Light and other March reads

I finished 12 books in March:

Warning Light by David Ricciardi (ARC)
The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn (audiobook)
A Matter of Trust by Lis Wiehl (audiobook)
Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Dead Watch by John Sandford (audiobook)
Joyland by Stephen King
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (audiobook)
Nice Try, Jane Sinner by Lianne Oelke
The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman (audiobook)
Heir of Fire by Sarah J. Maas
A Million Worlds With You by Claudia Gray

I received a copy of Warning Light by David Ricciardi from the publisher (Berkley/ Penguin Random House) in exchange for an honest review. Warning Light is scheduled for release on April 17, 2018.

Imagine this. You are on an international flight, perhaps for business, perhaps for vacation. Your plane begins to struggle, the pilot tells everyone that there is a minor engine issue and all is well. Then the pilot revises his statement. Your plane will be making an emergency landing due to complications with the minor engine issues.

Your plane lands safely. In the midst of Iran. Your plane is emptied into a deserted, earthquake damaged airport. You are pulled aside by airport staff and asked why you are in Iran, why you were taking pictures as you exited the plane. You insist that you are there by coincidence, just like everyone else on the plane, that you were taking pictures of the beautiful sunset.

But they don’t believe you. You are beaten. You are detained.

What do you do? More importantly, what should you do? What choices can you make that will keep you alive, that will get your back home?

This is how Warning Light starts. And I was all in.

I am hit or miss on spy/ political thrillers. Sometimes I struggle to get into the story. But that was not the case here. I was eager to continue reading, knowing that this type of book would be loaded with twists and turns that would keep the story moving.

And that was the problem. Far too soon in the story Warning Light had a plot twist that I feared was coming. One that I won’t reveal here, but it took the story directly into the land of the type of story I don’t usually enjoy. From there, Ricciardi continued to pile on the improbabilities and I found myself buying into the story less and less, caring about the main character less and less.

This is probably a novel that many people will enjoy, but it was not the novel for me. I would have enjoyed the story more if the novel had not turned so far from the path it started down in the first thirty pages.

No comments:

Post a Comment