Book Reviews, Etc

I’ve read Back to Bienville, and I recommend it. It’s not a typical book for these pages — it’s a non-fiction memoir about a woman’s healing experience with God. But it is a moving testimony, and since it’s free today (April 22) and tomorrow (4/23) why not grab a copy?

The Author, Melinda Matthews, is also a leader and powerful encourager in the tribe of clean authors on twitter, so if you’re on twitter and like books without explicit sex, follow her!

As an added bonus, her book Romeo, Juliet, Petie & Me is also free. It’s a short story about a dog. Download your copy today!

The writer of fiction must dance a delicate ballet with realism every time he sets pen to page. The words must be different enough from the humdrum world in which we live to send the reader on a voyage of escapism. At the same time, they must be believable enough to make it easy for the reader to begin that voyage.

Most readers don’t know what an FBI hostage negotiator feels as she does her job. Most readers don’t know what a special ops veteran feels as he raids an enemy base. The writer must create those “unrealistic” (for most of us) experiences as “realistically” as possible so that we can believe them enough to take the voyage.

In the first two instances — the FBI profiler and the soldier in a covert operation — Betrayal by Tim Tigner performs exceptionally well. These parts of the novel pull you in and make the pages seem to turn themselves. I love those portions of the book.

However, there’s a third major storyline: that of a candidate for Vice President and, he hopes, later President, and his campaign manager. The problem is, I am a campaign manager. In my day job, I help political candidates get elected — or at least I used to. It’s a stressful occupation that involves reading voter registration spreadsheets, planning parties, writing fundraising letters, and more.

Here’s what we don’t do: sneak into the candidate’s bedroom at night and chloroform his girlfriend so we can get a conversation alone with him about how he has to dump her because she’s too tall.

Which is, of course, exactly what the shadowy campaign manager does in this story. It destroyed my willing suspension of disbelief so badly that I just couldn’t fully enjoy the other — much more awesome — threads of the story. It makes me suspect maybe the portrayals of the soldier and FBI agent are as questionable as the portrayal of the politician, but I don’t know that because I’ve never done those jobs.

Betrayal by Tim Tigner is a lot of fun to read when it’s about action heroes taking and saving lives. Read it if you love those things and don’t care about politics much. But if you know too many details of how politics really works, this might not be the book for you.