A review by snowkab
Black Friday by Alex Kava
3.0
I'll preface this review with something: I have never read any other books in this series or by this author. I just needed to read a book with a day or a date in the title for a reading challenge. So if you're looking for a reviewer whose read the six books that came before it, I'm not it.
I read this book in two days (it's not long, and I had free time) and it was a mostly enjoyable read. It's a pretty standard thriller with a pretty standard villain- at no point did the villain surprise me. In fact, I'm not certain any plot twist caught me by surprise. Except maybe one towards the very end? Uber spoilers for the ending:.
One of my major issues with this book is that it is cluttered with point-of-view characters. We had Rebecca, Patrick, Henry, Maggie, Project Manager/Asante, and Nick. There may have been another, but I don't really care. This book is 295 pages with 83 chapters. It only covers four days. Six perspectives makes it super redundant. Why did we need Rebecca and Patrick? Why did we need Maggie and Nick? Why did we need Henry at all? I know that the villain's perspective is standard in thrillers, but that's one of the reasons I don't read a lot of them.
I'm not certain why Rebecca was chosen to be a POV character. She didn't really add... anything to the plot except as a way to make the Project Manager scarier?
Nick also bothered me, but I think I was supposed to like him. He apparently had shown up in a few previous books? Whatever. He was an entitled jerk who got jealous every time Maggie so much as looked at another dude. He drove by her house and looked up the license plate number of another truck there! Red flag, dude, red flag. He was also somewhat pointless. He was there to add some weird tension, I think, and to supply the like two bits of plot-relevant info that he had.
I think this would have been a much stronger book with a smaller cast of characters. Part of the struggle was me jumping into the middle of series (although a series intended to let people jump in), but part of it was just bad writing. There were too many times that chapters had to skip back an hour and do it over and over so we could learn what the different characters did at the same time. We didn't need to watch every character learn about the bombing and make travel plans and arrive and see the place for the first time and introduce each other to every character.
I read this book in two days (it's not long, and I had free time) and it was a mostly enjoyable read. It's a pretty standard thriller with a pretty standard villain- at no point did the villain surprise me. In fact, I'm not certain any plot twist caught me by surprise. Except maybe one towards the very end? Uber spoilers for the ending:
Spoiler
I thought they had killed Patrick. I was a little disappointed that the author copped out with a garage bomb. That didn't seem in line with the villain's motivationOne of my major issues with this book is that it is cluttered with point-of-view characters. We had Rebecca, Patrick, Henry, Maggie, Project Manager/Asante, and Nick. There may have been another, but I don't really care. This book is 295 pages with 83 chapters. It only covers four days. Six perspectives makes it super redundant. Why did we need Rebecca and Patrick? Why did we need Maggie and Nick? Why did we need Henry at all? I know that the villain's perspective is standard in thrillers, but that's one of the reasons I don't read a lot of them.
I'm not certain why Rebecca was chosen to be a POV character. She didn't really add... anything to the plot except as a way to make the Project Manager scarier?
Spoiler
But don't tell me this guy is uber smart and has contingencies and then he comes at a scared teenage girl with a loaded syringe in his hand? What an idiot- of course she runs.Nick also bothered me, but I think I was supposed to like him. He apparently had shown up in a few previous books? Whatever. He was an entitled jerk who got jealous every time Maggie so much as looked at another dude. He drove by her house and looked up the license plate number of another truck there! Red flag, dude, red flag. He was also somewhat pointless. He was there to add some weird tension, I think, and to supply the like two bits of plot-relevant info that he had.
I think this would have been a much stronger book with a smaller cast of characters. Part of the struggle was me jumping into the middle of series (although a series intended to let people jump in), but part of it was just bad writing. There were too many times that chapters had to skip back an hour and do it over and over so we could learn what the different characters did at the same time. We didn't need to watch every character learn about the bombing and make travel plans and arrive and see the place for the first time and introduce each other to every character.