Left to Die, by Blake Pierce

ISBN: 9781094350202
Amazon ID: B084T89JJK

Very uninspiring.

An FBI investigator behaves very unprofessionally, is surrounded by French police who behave even more unprofessionally, and spends a large part of the story in Germany, in a town we are not even told the name of, or given any street names from.

In chapter 3 we are told about the jokes written on the outside of the wrappers of a particular type of sweets.

Later in the same chapter, someone steps out of the shower at 6:12 a.m. and hears the phone ringing in the next room. She has time to dry off and get dressed before then answering the phone. That's both an amazingly patient caller, and a surprisingly long ring time before voicemail kicks in.

The French police personnel are frequently referred to as gendarmerie (which is the name of the police force, not the people working in it), instead of gendarmes.

Oh, and the organisation she's working with on behalf of the FBI is the DGSI. Do you know who the DGSI is? I didn't, and despite the abbreviation being used 56 times throughout the book, never once is it explained what the abbreviation stands for or what the organisation is.

By chapter 11 the jokes are now written on the inside of the wrappers of the same type of sweets.

In chapter 17, "Robert lifted his right hand, his thumb pressed between the pages of a book." That sounds most uncomfortable; managing the get your thumb between the pages of a book and then pressing it there with your fingers.

The central character grew up in France and then in Germany and is fluent in both languages. When someone quotes "Bundesinstitut für Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte" she "inwardly translates" this into English. Why would someone who is fluent in German translate a German organisation's name into English for herself?

A character in the story is called Porter Schmidt, which is described as "such a German name". Wikipedia lists 13 people with the forename Porter, and all are American. I've asked a few Germans how common they think the name Porter is, and none of them has ever come across a German named Porter. A Google search for the name also turns up zero results in Germany.

By chapter 32, we find the main character answering her mobile phone in an office building, and for privacy leaving the room and entering a lift. She then manages to have a video call as the lift descends to the ground floor, where the doors open, but she chooses to stay inside to continue the call. That must be a very impressive base station her phone is registered to, to give her video-quality bandwidth inside a descending lift.

All in all, this is a very uninspiring character in a not-very-interesting story, set in a location we're not even told the name of.

I'm not surprised it's free of charge on Amazon.

According to the bibliography, which appears at both the beginning and the end of the book, the author has produced 85 books, and according to this website she has churned out 215 books between 2015 and 2023:

That means that in 2022, the author was, on average, producing one book every 5.8 days, and between 2016 and 2022, the sustained average was 14 days per book over a period of 7 years.

I guess this just illustrates the trade-off between quality and quantity.

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