cedar_grove | Another Book Review. (Reply)

And then there was the third complicating circumstance. A truly interesting circumstance. One of the women had recently been pestered by a young geneticist named Angus Nairn who was trying to carry out blood tests.
The Marks of Cain by Tom Knox.

This is one that I read this month. Can you believe that? I actually read a book. Actually it's not fair to say that, because I've been reading a lot of books on Kindle for PC. I mean to review those kind of as a series when I get to the 'end' of them.

The Marks of Cain was a little bit slow to start with, and left you wondering how and where the two strands of the story's plot would join together, because it was obvious that they would, somewhere along the line, and while it was an interesting and imaginitive use of some historical paradoxes and facts and things that shouldn't have happened but did, the story suffered from what I'm going to call the 24 syndrome.

You know how, in the TV series 24 that Jack and co have a really bad, unrelenting day from start to finish? Well that's pretty much the life of the characters in this story. The enemy/antagonist just keeps on turning up, and they never get a moments peace. You know it's going to happen, and you just keep waiting for it to happen, but when it does it just makes you groan, because, please /no/ one individual has eyes that far and wide - I don't care /who/ he is or what organisations he has in his pocket. That for me was something that took away from the story.

Unfortunately, too, the ending smacked a little of 'deux ex.' Either I /missed/ the clues as to what was going on all through the story, that led to this ending, or it was just an ending that came out of the blue, a plot device that existed only in the author's head/outline, and never in the text, and without reading it again, I couldn't tell you which - and as far as that goes, it was good to read the book once, but a second time might be pushing it.