Oh, man. I just don't know how Mr. O'Brien does it. How does this author always seem to both amaze and annoy me at the same time?
For the wow factor - it's pretty simple. As usual, he is at the top of his game with setting the tone in his stories. His storytelling sets the dark tone right from the very beginning. It pulls you in from scene one and from there on, you're hooked. Some poor joe is going to to get it - and not in a good way. I really appreciate that about Mr. O'Brien's writing style. I love that you don't have to get fifty or more pages in to his novels for something awful to happen. Call me morbid, but I love it when the you-know-what hits the fan right from the very beginning.
Left for Dead was no different. Our victim, Claire, is one of many women to fall prey to an artistic serial killer dubbed "Rembrandt" for the works of art he creates on a woman's physical features after painting their faces with pristine cosmetics. She is an amnesiac who awakens to find that her teenage son is missing and no one, including her own husband, is willing to tell her why he supposedly ran away. This woman wakes up to secrets and cover-ups that later begins to unravel when she allies with the only other person, a Seattle policeman and part-time cartoonist, who seems willing to help her. In the meantime, Rembrandt is still out there and the killings just keep adding up and soon it's discovered that Rembrandt might actually have ties to Claire's island home of Deception, painting everyone as a potential suspect...
There is not much more I'm willing to say about the overall plot of the story because I don't want to give away a single plot twist. So I will move on to what annoyed me and that was the shallowness of the characters themselves.
This is the second time I've had to listen to how attractive the lead character was - and it wasn't just her, either. Everyone looked like a centerfold. All the people were pretty or handsome from the victims to potential serial killer suspects. I don't know, it made for an unlikely scenario to me, like they were living in a plastic society or something.
I don't know why that irked me so much, but it kind of did. I just didn't know why it was necessary for every introduction made involving Claire we had to be reminded how beautiful she was. Same thing of Officer Tim Sullivan. Almost every scene with him we were reminded of how attractive he was to women. What is that really about? I don't know, but in Claire's case, maybe I was annoyed because outside of Claire's beauty in particular, there wasn't a single redeeming thing about her. I mean, she was likeable enough, but she was the cliche damsel in distress if there ever was one. She couldn't stand up for herself and at every turn except for maybe at the tail-end when things hit a crescendo, she was absolutely defenseless. She wouldn't even stand up for her son's memory as a mother when the entire town made her feel like she had no right to ask about her son's whereabouts. She was weaker than she had a right to be, in my opinion. I'd think I was pretty bad-ass if I survived an attack from a serial killer and I wouldn't let that plastic town keep me from discovering the truth about my son or the nature of my attack. Claire cowered under her husband and his pushy friend, Linda's, rules. I wanted to scream "Get it together, bitch!" more than once.
Alright, I'm through ranting. It was a good book - a great book, actually. I just didn't like the characters. I thought only one character - Claire's friend, Tess, that she met in the hospital - truly had heart in the entire story, in my opinion. Everyone else was either annoying, insensitive (Harlan, Linda), pathetic (Claire), pointless (Nurse Sherita, who practically falls off of the face of the map after being fully integrated in the first 20 percent of the story and then the tail-end), or just too sexy to be a real cartoonist (Officer Sullivan). So barring all of that, this was as suspenseful of a book that I'm used to reading from Kevin O' Brien and, honestly, I think this would make a great first read for someone whose never read a book from this author before.
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2014
- Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2019
Top reviews from other countries
- Pierre BlaisReviewed in Canada on May 12, 2022
Fantastic reading just like others I have read from this author.
