Ever watch the cultish 1990 film Jacob's Ladder with Tim Robbins? Remember the queasy sensation that every scene in the movie was designed to disguise the truth? When I watched it again, it only confirmed the feeling that I was being conned.
I was barely a quarter of the way into this novel by Bulgarian Nina Nenova before I began having the creeping suspicion that I had been here before. Not to the oasis in the middle of the desert with its dozen millionaire inhabitants, but to the mental space of the too-clever writer whose descriptions are engineered to confuse and distract the reader.
I knew the author's background, so initially I excused the tortured storyline as a result of being translated from her native tongue. (And despite the translation from other-than-English, the language itself was stellar; no typos, good command of grammar, excellent choice of words.) Eventually, though, I became convinced that this was another Jacob's Ladder, and the dust being thrown was intended to obscure comprehension.
At the end, this was a confused mystery/suspense thriller with a lot of mystical confetti and pseudo-physics tossed into the mix. Before I had reached the midpoint, I recognized the con game in process. I no longer cared who-dunnit. In fact, I didn't care which characters lived or died. Poisoned by maguffins, I gave up without regret, thumbed forward to the reveal and the expected post-climactic twist.
I am very glad I got this as a Kindle First freebie. I would have been mortified to have paid to be a victim of this con.
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