garbage as usual time for a new author
932309
To unreal  same old stuff .time to find another author. Common plot never any suspense unreal circumstances. Time to change
1769367
I have enjoyed the offerings from this author in the past.

This was rubbish.

I am not sure if he is trying to write some sort of crappy erotica, is sexually frustrated, or where his mindset was, but the book reads like the delusional viewpoint of a teenager who needs to get laid.

The stories this author comes up with have drawn me into a goodly number of series.  In fact, I will say I thoroughly enjoyed the young ancients, and the first other places book was a fun read.  21% into this one however, and that was enough.  The quality of editing has always been bad, and that continues here, but even the story itself up to that point was nothing but poorly written sexual innuendo... Or flat out sexual conversation.

Don't get me wrong, I am not prudish, and believe sex scenes can move any story along when needed.  However... Every single aspect of this book up,to the point where I finally hit the "delete from device" button was about how hot someone was, or why they should not sleep with someone else... On and on and on.

Just terrible.  And for goodness sake... Buy a thesaurus and get an editor.  A typo or two can be overlooked, but page after god awful page of them is just too much.

Do yourself a favor and detour right past this book.  It is a poor representation of the story lines the author is capable of offering to the readers.
2341452
Life is too short...to read bad books.  This is one of those books that I wish I had a do-over button and could get back the part of my life that I wasted on it.  This book reads like a high school student's English class essay.  Its juvenile composition and constant, jarring grammatical and spelling errors make it impossible to get any enjoyment out of the book.

  Written in first person, the heroine jumps from scene to scene with no coherent flow.  Samantha, the heroine, comes across as a whiny, pathetic adolescent and is particularly unlikeable.  The author needs to be introduced to the joys of complex sentences, rather than short, declarative half-sentences.  And the constant questioning: "Why did he do that?  Why did I do this? What am I doing now?  Why is my life so confused?  Why don't I know about my husband's past?  Why?  Why?  Why?  Enough!  The first half dozen chapters are labored, irritating and fragmented.

  Maybe there's an interesting plot buried in the inanity somewhere. I don't know, and can't bring myself to care.  This book is ridiculous, and not worth the .99 cents I paid for the download.  My advice?  Skip it; read some Elizabeth Lowell or Nora Roberts.  They both did this story first, and did it a thousand times better.  If only I could puzzle out a way to get my 99 cents back!
4536456
Giving this one star is generous. The characters are sketchy at best. The plot is barely "alright" and the author employs this misspelling of ALL RIGHT throughout the selection. The author alludes to the persecution of witches without giving concrete examples (until the end--and still, general, lacking detail). The threat against them is unclear and fails to add any dramatic tension. Long spans of time pass without adequate explanation.  The cover art and description "hoaxed" me into downloading this ebook (See author's bio for reference). I'm glad that I didn't spend money on it. This writer needs a serious editor. With this bland, beige, sad read, I'll skip the sequels. Humph!
1670759
I am at a complete loss as to how this novel has garnered an almost 5-start rating. The dialogue between characters is laughable. The characters' personalities are ridiculously vapid and vacillating (Sim has a conversation with Enaya about his feelings for her and 24 hours later he's having sex with a woman who has been raped for the past 5 years? Does that make sense from any angle?) Deus Ex Machina is used to a nauseating extent. Mr. Brooks must have enlisted every person he has ever met to write all these positive reviews. This is the first review I have ever written, and I only did so, because I would hate for anyone to waste their money or the time it takes to read 776 pages of garbage. Please, before you buy, sample the book and see for yourself how badly The Innkeeper's Son was written. Also, if you refuse to believe this post, take a look at how similar the five star reviews are; you'll notice something very fishy about them all.
456461
My first bad review. Very bad. For a point of reference, I have read everything by Cotterill, Chris G. Moore, Burdett, Daniel Silva, Martin Cruz Smith and others. I love those authors. This is horrible. If it got better after 40 pages, I will never know., Writing is very immature. If you value your reading time, you should pass on this one.
1618749
This book would have been fine as a first work by a college student studying creative writing, but as the product of a best selling author it is a joke. The dialog is banal, the characters are so thin you can see through them, and the plot is implausible. I can take implausibility if it is at least entertaining, but I can't even say I was entertained by it. Can someone tell me how the main character, whose wife is murdered many years ago, suddenly has a third child? No explanation. No reference to where this child came from, and obviously no editor for this author.

My only reason for finishing the book was that I fully believed there must be something redeeming in it for a publisher to make the effort to print it. Sadly, I was mistaken. Even the chapter structure was childish, since almost every chapter averaged only two or three pages.

There are thousands of great books out there by truly smart writers, so there is no excuse to read this book.
4110722
Starting with this first book, this series is infuriating for many reasons. The author has moments of genius interspersed with garbage and cliche. Some characters, especially in this first book, are complete garbage characters built on cliche, but used more heavily than your typical throw-away character. Yet other characters, are thought out, deeper, and unique.  Even some of these unique characters, though, suffer from cliche and repetitiveness- their backstories are very brief, resulting in repeated references to the same history. I found myself reading to find the moments of genius creativity, while suffering through a plot that is essential the love child of "Starship Troopers" and "Ender's Game" (80% "Starship Troopers"). This first book, overall, feels rushed. It seems as if the author and the editor both had looming deadlines and ended up publishing a book below its potential.
1438024
This is worse than a one star rip-off of the author's name written by someone who could have been a brain-addled 5th grade boy watching too many violent video games. I'm a Stuart Woods fan because I like the light, breezy, underdeveloped characters with their sexual prowess, gourmet tastes or villainy--just a total escape in a 3 night at bedtime read. But this awful mess takes non-development of characters and plot with major (!) loose ends  to a new low in popular. It's a disgusting, unnecessarily violent, 300 pages purely to make money. Just o make money by selling book? I'd say this to Mr. Wood, to paraphrase someone during the McCarthy area: "Have you no  shame?"
934759
I really hope that the author reads the bad reviews on this site because that way he should easily figure it out that he is not meant to write books. It's sad someone let him publish one but it's never too late to stop. I was looking up free books on my nook and I came across this. Just by looking at the title anyone with a common sense can tell that it will be trash. One who would give a title like that to his book already has problems. Now I have to agree with some of the other people who say that this is not a book. It's more like random sentences somehow put in some order and then written down. Like if someone took some random notes of a persons life and then wrote them down in the order of events.. It is almost unbearably dumb. If I didn't know better I would assume that it was written by a 10 year old child who is not very good at creative writing but has a homework to write a book and he has to produce something so he doesn't get an F. The story is not the worst but I just can't see how the author or anyone as a matter of fact thought this was even worth finish reading. I can't even finish reading it. It's almost not even worth free. I wish I was paid to waste my time reading it and even then I would not do it again. And I only got through less than half of it. This is the kind of book that I would expect someone write after waking up from a coma that caused severe brain damage. Please if you value your time on earth do not read even the title.
3523295
Terrible author in serious need of an editor. He has little idea of how to tell a story or get to the point. For example, Jane will be traveling down a road and a car passes her in the other direction. Perry will go off on a tangent talking about that family's structure, their emotions, what hypothetical thoughts might be going through their heads at that moment (none of which have anything to do with Jane or the story). The family in the other car isn't essential to the plot or story in any way--they literally are just random passerby on the road who should exit the story in an instant. Instead Perry will devote paragraph after paragraph to them.

In another instance, Jane drives by a bush. Perry elaborates how that bush was likely planted by the ancestors of whoever owns the house now. Perry supposes they were probably farmers and did it to protect crops from the wind...and it's just a random house she passes without any relevance to the plot.

Imagine an entire book of this insipid, meandering nonsense. At times it goes on for pages elaborating on the most minute irrelevant details.

As an author, Perry is a "hoarder," unable to let go of even the most trivial sentence which comes to his mind. I imagine he hated writing this book as much as I hated reading (read: trudging) through its sludge because he simply will not get to the point and only begrudgingly does so in the most passive aggressive way imaginable.

Rather than buy this book, consider purchasing a drill and slowly boring it into your brain--the experience is very similar. I can't decide if that or Chinese Water Torture is the most apt comparison, only I could tolerate Chinese Water Torture far longer than I can.digest Perry in one sitting.
4784297
What a waste of my time and money!  This author is living in a time warp!  If you have another title, just change the names and you'll have a new book.  How does she get away with submitting the same crap to the publisher?

Palmer's male characters are gods gift to women and get away with treating women like trash.  The women are so fiesty, they put their men in their place with witty responses like "you, beast!"  ...Blah, Blah, Blah.............
827131
This book was given to me by a neighbor as a quick read and had a fifty cent price tag on it from a garage sale and it was still overpriced on both prices. The title doesn't tell you anything except maybe how many characters and/or sub-plots there are. The characters are ridiculous and mostly unlikable. The writing itself seems half-assed. I made the comment to my wife after I trudged through this mess that it read and ended as though Evanovich was working against a hard deadline and threw something together. I don't know when I've been more annoyed from reading a book. I was hoping to find a new author, a new series but instead will stay far away and recommend no one else waste their time and certainly not their money on this book and possibly the author in general.
3711905
Most authors get better overtime, not Maggie Sefton. This book was worse than the last. She has learned a few new words and phrases, for example Whoa, Don't worry, and vandal, these appear ad nauseum in the book. Kelly is not even a likable character. She interferes in Mimi's business, offering free classes and determining what should be done in the shop. Then she sits on her throne while her friends run both her ranches, come up with ways to support her ridiculous purchases and basically do her bidding. The dialogue among supposedly mature professional adults is sophomoric at best. Select another cozy, Monica Ferris or Mary Kruger for your knitting fix. Amazon should offer a zero star review, this book qualifies.
3535418
I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to think I should just quit reading Crichton's books.  "Prey" was OK; "State of Fear" was pretty dreadful.  Thankfully, those and this book are the only ones I've read so far.  I'm not even going to touch "Next," from what I've heard.  I picked up this early book of his, hoping maybe it'd be different.  But no -- it's the same old cardboard characters whose quirks are told to us rather than shown (did he never attend even one writing workshop?).  The same old making science into an image that fits the plot, bending facts at will and just making some up (eg, having the guys swim open-eyed through some mysterious disinfectant, like that's going to get all the bacteria...).  The same old blunt-force foreshadowing.  The same old lecturing and moralizing.  Ugh.  The one saving grace was that it was a fast read.
4112255
There is a huge vacancy in character development. The whole book is put forth in such a way that I found it impossible to suspend disbelief. The copy editing was flawless, but someone surely should have recognized that there seriously needed to be more time spent fleshing out  the details to make this a real story. I downloaded this title for free with no stipulations and consider it to be a waste of time and storage space.. I will place this author on my personal do not read list. At his age one would think that he would be capable of reading his own work and realize when it is as half baked as this is and withhold it from publication.
3648406
I have read a lot of books in my time. I'm a "fan" of many authors and am usually inspired by their cleverness. This is no the case for Shuman. I have to believe that the only reason this man got published is because he was a cop.

The story is contrite, the character flimsy, and the story boring. I literally have tried to read this book twice and can't get past the first 100 pages. There are so many holes in his technique that I literally am yelling at this book, "Come On!"

Honestly, the only reason I have attempted twice is because I keep leaving it on my desk at work and I like to read while I eat lunch. But, this is to awful to continue.

I would not recommend this book unless someone needed a doorstop or you found it in the discount bin for .75c seriously. I borrowed it from the library and still feel jipped by it; I think that whoever gave this a postive review is doing so based on previous works which I have not read. Judging by this work, I will be leaving this author from the library from now on.

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