My rating: 2 of 5 stars
As a fan of thrillers I began reading Faithless Heart with my usual hopes of an intriguing and engaging ‘who done it’ novel; a ‘good read’ possibly in the style of Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe novels. This novel had been presented to me as a historical novel set mainly in the 1950s but, for me, there was such a lack of verisimilitude I could not easily accept it as such. The blurb gave a similar impression, notwithstanding its alerts about the sexual nature of the story, hovering around the rumours of the Hollywood casting couch. Well, it was not at all similar to the thriller novels I’ve enjoyed; such as those of Ian Rankin, Dan Brown or John Grisham, and of which I am a fan, since there was a serious lack of subtlety, mystery and anticipation or even the odd twists in the tale. It is obviously a book much more of the graphic (very!) and hard-boiled genre of fiction, and I found it quite difficult to like from beginning to end. I counted 82 mentions of the f*** word as well as almost countless times the plot moved into a sexual scene. The main character, Mark McMichaels, a detective, was not someone I found myself rooting for to the end. He was obsessed with women’s bodies, and the endless descriptions of his thoughts about almost every woman he met, became rather tedious after a while. The plot moved from one violent or sexual scene to the next with such regularity, that I found myself thinking, ‘Another page, another act of…’ etc. so often it became boring. No doubt this would be quite titillating for many a teenage boy reader. But I could not wait until I reached the end of the book, which lamely raced ahead about thirty years and felt rushed. The frequent changes of the story’s point of view, which suddenly arises about two thirds in, were confusingly unexpected, and felt like unnecessary padding out about the historical context of the tale. There were a few punctuation and typo issues that invited some editing attention.
View all my reviews