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richardwells's review against another edition
3.0
Candy, easily consumed in one sitting. Fast, fun, meets all the necessary criteria of a thriller-diller. Nice premise of a corrupt NGO busted by an innocent who becomes not quite so innocent.
brettt's review
1.0
When I was younger, the grocery stores we shopped at usually didn't have a nice rack of books arranged on a newsstand-like set of shelves. They were often on a standalone wire spinner and seemed rarely grouped according to category. I don't know if that was intentional -- in order to check out the kind of books you liked, you had to check out all four sides of the spinner and thus you might find yourself drawn to a new book you hadn't considered before, bringing another sale to the store. Or it could have been that the people who unpacked the books just stuck them in empty spinner slots, or browsers took them from one place but put them back somewhere else.
There usually weren't very many books on the spinners, and it seems like I remember a low turnover rate. So checking them out often meant seeing the same books several times. But that was more exciting than accompanying Mom on her grocery-buying rounds, which never included enough purchases of important items like potato chips and peanut butter and which rarely allowed for a large enough variety of cereal purchases.
I offer this little memory lane jaunt for two reasons: 1) I picked up Kyle Mills' 2009 novel Lords of Corruption from such a spinner in a little nearby Dollar General and 2) that fact is by far the most interesting thing about this story of Josh Hagarty, hired by a charity to help African farmers -- until he learns not everything about the charity is as it appears. Mills joins an unlikeable protagonist to a double-handful of plot holes and predictable situations told in a pedestrian style that you definitely would want to write home about -- in order to warn them away. He brings up several interesting and important ideas about charitable work in Africa, its potential for fraud and its cultural implications, but only to display them as set pieces, not to chew on. They fill the same role as plastic fruit -- they can be viewed, but are otherwise useless. The same, for that matter, can be said of Lords of Corruption.
Original available here.
There usually weren't very many books on the spinners, and it seems like I remember a low turnover rate. So checking them out often meant seeing the same books several times. But that was more exciting than accompanying Mom on her grocery-buying rounds, which never included enough purchases of important items like potato chips and peanut butter and which rarely allowed for a large enough variety of cereal purchases.
I offer this little memory lane jaunt for two reasons: 1) I picked up Kyle Mills' 2009 novel Lords of Corruption from such a spinner in a little nearby Dollar General and 2) that fact is by far the most interesting thing about this story of Josh Hagarty, hired by a charity to help African farmers -- until he learns not everything about the charity is as it appears. Mills joins an unlikeable protagonist to a double-handful of plot holes and predictable situations told in a pedestrian style that you definitely would want to write home about -- in order to warn them away. He brings up several interesting and important ideas about charitable work in Africa, its potential for fraud and its cultural implications, but only to display them as set pieces, not to chew on. They fill the same role as plastic fruit -- they can be viewed, but are otherwise useless. The same, for that matter, can be said of Lords of Corruption.
Original available here.
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