Excruciatingly painfual and predictable
924223
If this is the first book written by the writer, I will never have bought the second book, at least not buying it as a hardback.  It took me a long time to finish reading it, not without pain and suffering, unlike reading the first book.  The first book, Ariel, written by the author in 1983, when he was still in college, I believe, and was reprinted in 2009.  What the author lacked in skill then, was compensated by his raw talent and passion, almost like watching Bruce Lee's first kung fu movie, while he might lack acting skills, one could admire his raw martial arts talents and his passion in kung fu.  When I read Ariel, I felt what the author felt, I felt like I was with him in his adventure.  The book is fast and entertaining.  However, I cannot say the same about this second book, the long awaited sequel, Elegy Beach, written some 26 years later.  The disappointment is similar to my waiting and finally reading the last volume of Ricardo Pinto's trilogy - The Third God (The Stone Dance of the Chameleon).  This book, Elegy Beach, shifted attention to the son, Fred, of the main character, Pete in the first book.  This story is basically about good (Fred) vs evil (Yan, buddy of Fred).  The first part of the book actually is very enjoyable and the story is quite entertaining.  It evolves around Fred, Yan, and Yan's family (Dr. Ram, Yan's Dad, Parmita, Yan's mom and Nan (Nandiata), Yan's beautiful sister) and Fred's boss, Paypal.  It reflects the maturity of the writer and his improvement in writing skills.  Unfortunately, when the author tried to tie Pete with Fred and tried to explain the lost 30 years of Pete since Ariel, it has become cumbersome because the author spent way too much space in dragging the whole story backwards and it was like he was mumbling to himself without paying any attention to his readers.  It got worst when he tried very hard to connect the Ariel, the unicorn in the first story, with Pete and through Pete, with Fred.  Sadly, while there is a intimate relationship between Pete and Ariel in the first story which I believe that was what made the story dear to the readers, there was no such relationship between Ariel and Fred, it almost like Ariel was forced upon Fred.  It is almost better, in my humble opinion, the second book will be better without both Pete or Ariel, or at least not take up so much space.  It is like one who admires both Jackie Chan an Jet Li and finally be able to watch the movie (Monkey king) with both of them in it, only found it both boring, slow pace and dreadful.  The second part of this book was almost like that to me.  The writer made Yan into a very powerful "wizard" and it almost seemed like Fred had no hope against him.  Every step of the plot is just so predictable and the ending is so anti-climatic and abrupt.  The handling of the characters, in the later part of the book, to me, is quite unorganized and almost careless.  Therefore, giving a 2 start to this book may be a little bit harsh, however I really do not believe it really deserves a 5 or 4 stars given by other raters and would like to balance it out a little bit.  I believe you can really wait till the paperback to come out before you purchase this book.  It is unbelievable that while many good SF writers such as Patricia Briggs had to wait a long time before her books would be published in hardback, this author actually had his second book come out in hardback.  It also makes me wonder what if he had written his second or third book much sooner, right after Ariel, may be just may be there will be more raw passions in them.  What do you think?
3016247
It is rare that I get truly bored with a book. I couldn't wait for this one to be over. It just kept going and going, ridiculous turn after ridiculous turn.
It seemed like the author wanted to stuff in every suspense trope known to man. If you, like me, are tired of narrators "forgetting" large parts of their lives, don't bother with this one. I cannot wait for this trend in suspense/thriller writing to vanish. It is such a copout.
I read this on my kindle, so I don't know how many pages it has, but I'd say it could have ended at 75 percent or so. But no, it kept "twisting and turning," but by this point was so irritatingly predictable I had to force myself to finish.
1881115
I was hoping it might be an exciting set of whodunits.  I got maybe a few pages into the first book and couldn't read any longer. In just those few pages was more violence, viciousness and just plain ugliness that I knew I had to stop reading or suffer horrible nightmares for heaven only knows how long.  Unless you are into that kind of stuff, I strongly urge  you to avoid these books like the plague.
3420725
The beginning of this book was pretty good - but that just made it's downward spiral all the more painful.

I got extremely tired of Brenda's never-ending self-doubt, her mothers 'defiant' public displays of affection with her son's (18 year younger) best friend (I'm sorry, that was just icky and not well done of them - and it's not that the woman is the one old enough to be the others parent.  It would be just as inappropriate if it were their father with the daughters best friend) and her obnoxious boss Tony.  I wanted to throw the book out somewhere around that horrible scene on the boat - how much dysfunctional, childish behavior do you really want to spend your time reading about?

If half the size, this book may have been a cute read.  As it is it's a long drawn out farce.
4621630
This exercise in voluminous self-obsession and verbal volleyball is best reserved for those who want to read the same passages over and over again. I really wanted to like this book but for the life of me can't understand all the positive reviews. Faith just doesn't have to be this elaborate, contrived and difficult. It's a choice, not a battleground except for those who expect all their prayers to be immediately answered.

It is as if the author is looking for 1,000 slightly variant ways to say a few basic principles, teasing his reader along the path to some treasured epiphany. The extremely self-conscious, exhausting writing style is burdensome, tedious and frustratingly sluggish. Also, too many contrived metaphors such as "Addiction is a canoe on the Pacific." More like an old rubber duck in a splashy, slowly draining bath tub.

Ultimately, sometimes our prayers are answered, sometimes they aren't. Either way, drinking for the alcoholic or problem drinker will only hurt one's life, usually severely. Best always face your pain that ignites your addictions, continually forgive and have faith in your God. That's this book in three sentences.
501499
I generally enjoy Grisham's novels, but for me this book was pure torture.  I expected a legal-battle type of story line, but instead had to suffer through a long (seemingly never-ending) journey of constant and non-believable disappointments as  a reverend attempts to bring justice to a 10-year old murder case.  Anything that can go wrong indeed does go wrong as the author heaps upon the reader an insufferable series of almost laughable negative hurdles, and - worst of all - does so in the slowest possible fashion.

This becomes a "page turner" only because one feels the need to move the story along .. he/she certainly gets no help from the author.
2182889
The premise sounds exciting, but the book itself massively failed to deliver. I began this book in January and just finished it near the beginning of June, if that tells you anything. (I typically finish books in a week or two. If they're good, that is.)

The writing style? Kinda pretentious, and as much as I tried to shake it off, I couldnt. The plot? Predictable. The characters? Unlikeable, though not in the sense that they were mean or annoying, but just that they were so darned flat.

Events the plot hinges upon are illogical. I mean, (*SPOILER*), in what psych hospital can a man check out a woman to bring home without any documentation that he is who he says he is?? (*END SPOILER*)

It was largely a snooze fest with the exception of the last 50 pages when,  for literally the first time in the book-, theres some (predictable though unrealistic) action. Even so, at that point in the book I couldn't bring myself to care. I skimmed.

For its predictability, painful slowness, flat characters, and illogical plot line, Before I Go To Sleep just scrapes by with a 2 out of 5.
4730090
Fortunately, I read this on Kindle Unlimited.  If I had paid for it, I'd probably be one of those reviewers banging their fist and screaming about how Amazon should let you rate something zero stars.

The biggest flaw, among numerous flaws, is that the author gives the entire plot away in the first chapter.  The plot is predictable, so if you are even a semi-regular consumer of horror books and films, you can immediately see how it's going to turn out.  I'm baffled as to why anyone would do that, especially in a horror story.  There's no possibility for suspense if you tell the reader in advance what is going to happen.  If you're not a horror buff, and you didn't pay much attention during the first chapter, then when you get to the end you might be going, "Wait...what?  That didn't explain anything."  The information in that chapter should have been broken up and parceled out gradually as the story moved along.

Since the author killed any chance for suspense, her flat characterizations, irritating prose, and poor grasp of literary techniques were thrown into stark relief.  The characters are about what you would expect from a B movie.  In an attempt to compensate for lack of characterization, the author dumps a bunch of backstory on you by making copious use of that favored technique of novice writers, the flashback.  So many flashbacks, and so much exposition that's not quite a flashback scene but has many of the same qualities.  Maybe those should be called demi-flashbacks.  The characters don't feel like real people, so when there is the potential for something to be emotionally touching it falls flat, and the protagonist's psychological unraveling is not visceral and horrifying like it should be.  To take you even further out of the story, the author's similes and metaphors are awful.  I can't even say something as nice as that they obfuscate what they attempt to clarify.  They're so god-awful they made me snort.  Another thing that irked me was the use of excessive and unnecessary descriptions of the scene that did nothing to draw me further into the story or support thematic elements.  Why do I care what color and brand of shoes the characters are wearing?  Why interrupt an emotionally charged scene to tell me what color the speaker's shirt is?  This feels like something a struggling MFA student with no background in literary analysis would write.

As you might have already suspected from the last paragraph, this book seems to be suffering from lazy editing and copy-editing.  In fairness to the editing team, the author seems pretty awful, so maybe they are competent, but they got stuck with trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.  Some words are used excessively, and some of the word choices are just strange.  Like the incessant use of "slither" in places where another word would've been so much more appropriate.  Or the use of "straggling" to describe a trailer towed by the protagonist's car.  Did the trailer move slowly in a disorganized way, or trail away from the tow vehicle?  I can't concoct any scenario where "straggle" would accurately describe the behavior of a trailer hitched to a tow vehicle.  There are numerous places where continuity flies out the window.  Sometimes characters randomly change clothing in the same scene, and things in the background change position or appearance with no explanation.  There were a variety of little things that grated on my nerves, like the protagonist remembering his aunt knitting a crocheted blanket.

Perhaps the author should take up screen-writing instead of prose fiction.  This book would've been less awful as a movie.
87844
I am a detail oriented person. I am one to truly immerse myself in a book - get lost in it - so I love descriptive details in a book. As a result, I have never had any desire to skip even a single page while reading a novel. In fact, many times, I will re-read certain sections to form a very detailed "picture" in my mind of the story's setting. So, having found my self skipping ENTIRE SECTIONS of Digital Fortress, I can safely declare that this harrowing reading experience was the direct result of one of the worst jobs of "plot-unfolding" I've ever encountered. A huge fan of Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol, I am simply shocked that this was written by Dan Brown.

First of all, the attempts at being unpredictable were, well, predictable. I always hate when I anticipate the next scene and read on only to find that I was dead on...and knowing that a third grader would have come to the same conclusion.

I'm also put-off by female lead characters who are initially painted as tough, strong, and competent, but, in her actions and reactions, prove to be just as weak and pathetic as the typical pretty but pretty useless damsel in distress. Susan may be book-smart, but her thoughts and actions are incredibly "stupid." I found myself calling her that outloud. In the end, it doesn't even matter as there is absolutely nothing redeeming or admirable about her.

...and are we really supposed to accept the fact that during the nail-biting "countdown," this super-genius mega-powerful group at the National Security Agency couldn't pick up the Bat-phone to consult a nuclear physicist, so they had no other choice but to "Google it?" Really?

Such a shame, because the concept and overall predicament had real potential! Unfortunately, getting to the point is excruciatingly drawn out and painfully wordy, and the jellyfish of a heroine is far from heroic and annoyingly lame. Simply put, the storyline is ludicrous, the characters are cartoonish (you'll find yourself wishing the worst for all of them - or just cursing them aloud from your reading chair,) and for the non-techy geek reader, huge sections in the middle of the book are just pages and pages of seemingly endless "jibberish."
4741993
It pains me to say this, given how much I was looking forward to this book, but reading this thing physically hurts.  I will admit I'm only 40 pages in, but each paragraph brings a wince, a jolt of agony, incredulity, frustration.

Not at the story itself, but at the ghost writer's style.  First of all, she seems hell bent on mythologizing Maynard at all costs, to the point that every archetype is trotted out -- before Maynard is even 10.  "The Loner,"  "The Sensitive Artist," "The Savant" and so on. The early chapters are polluted with her constant assertions of hidden meanings in every interaction.  Her vocabulary and phrasing choices when writing about his days training in cross-country would be more fitting of The Odyssey than a description of high school boys plodding along for miles on a dusty road.  Always Maynard's presence is heroic, meaningful, significant.  Other times she quotes verbatim dialogues people in Maynard's 9 year-old presence were said to have produced, as though young Maynard were busy writing it all down for posterity while the adults around him were yammering on.

It's insufferable.  At her best, she's overly romantic and duly dedicated to a saccharine prose style (think 400 level creative fiction class). At her worst - which is more often the case than not - she borders on unintentional parody.  All of this at the expense of the story itself.  Which, when you unearth it from her tedious prose and worn out motifs, is compelling.

Maynard is a bad-ass.  He just is.  Because of this, a straight-forward (and I hesitate to go gender here, but a more) masculine style would have more effectively rendered his tale.  Maynard isn't about gaudy ornamentation or affectations of "high art."  It's a shame his story teller is both of those, boring, predictable things.

Anyway, I'm holding my nose and guarding my sensibilities and muscling through her horrid, overly perfumed prose only because of my interest in Maynard's story.  Maybe it gets better?
1387255
Here we have a real dog's dinner of a thriller: predictable, derivative, implausible, tedious, repetitive, and woefully inconsistent even within its own ridiculous worldview. The only reason I have awarded this concoction two stars is that I have seen worse -- and I don't mean that as a compliment.

If Mr Stevens had simply downloaded the Jack Reacher template from the Lee Child School of Thrillers website, and then proceeded to fill in the blanks willy-nilly, he could have saved himself some effort -- not that he appears to have expended much effort on this. The ruggedly handsome, overlarge hero is ex-army and ex-cop, has a facility with weapons and hand-to-hand combat, doesn't talk much, falls for the pretty, plucky heroine, kills an endless supply of mono-maniacle bad guys, etc. etc. etc. All the old Reacher tropes are aped and paraded shamelessly. True, the author did somehow manage to avoid naming his hero "Jack" (and calls him Joe, instead); but that is where the dissimilarity ended.

As if any of that was not bad enough, the reader is also treated to misspellings and typos, oddly transposed characters, and grammatical mistakes by the carload . . . In fact, all the sins of indie self-publishing are on full display here. And what explains the fascination with incomplete sentences, fragmented sentences, and sentence fragments as paragraphs? Once or twice in a novel, the technique can be an effective intensifier or driver. Six, eight, ten times a page is only lazy, or sloppy, or stupid -- or all three.

As a former pro editor, I have some advice for Mr Stevens if he intends to continue inflicting his fiction on the reading public:

1) Spend a little time actually learning how to write fiction.
2) Spend a little time in serious contemplation to come up with an original story worth telling.
3) Spend a little money on a genuine editor who can help you avoid the most egregious errors of the craft.
4) Spend a little more money on a good proof-reader who can spot the punctuation fails, all the words your PC spellchecker missed, as well as the fragments, non-sequiturs, and all the other nuts and bolts you obviously do not have time or inclination to correct.
5) Publish less and publish better.
4320153
From the synopsis, I would have assumed that the book would follow with cohesive theories answering those questions. Rather, Murphy's book is filled with gross assumptions, butchered imagery and disconnected ideas. Murphy treats the audience as if they didn't know anything about the `evils' of technology. The imagery he uses is overdramatic and ill fitting. He often digresses into topics, which seem totally irrelevant without any introduction or explanation. Sometimes I forgot what the book was about while reading it. The theories and ideas that Murphy proposes are enough to make most sane people outraged.  This book was painful to read, and painful for my checkbook.
4857349
The story line sounded intriguing, so I downloaded this book for free. Good thing - it would have been a waste of money as well as time. The character development was pathetic and sadly predictable. The spelling and grammar were horrendous... numerous sentences were like "snakes" - winding around and writhing painfully as they tried to go in too many directions. I found myself reading the same sentence 3 or 4 times to figure out what the writer was trying to say. I dislike profanity, and there was so much of it - fortunately, by skimming over the pages of all-cap yelling and F-bombs, I think I spared myself at least a third of the book. I grew weary of the heroine being described as "frail", even "bony". This was particularly annoying as she was exacting her revenge, a time in which descriptors evoking an image of power would have been much more appropriate and welcome.

Take my advice and skip this book unless you are an English teacher who is looking for bad examples.
4721594
This book was written at about the fourth-grade level, with a simple and predictable plot.  It could have been a good story. However, the time sequences are often confusing, subject-verb usage poor, descriptions of scenery long and often inaccurate: (for instance, the Mississippi River was referred to as a lake in one scene). I spent so much time trying to correct the usage errors and figuring out how the author could have written correctly, that I was distracted from the story itself.  I will not be reading any more of this author's work: it's painful!
918730
When I started reading this book, I thought I'd put my hands on a young adult novel by mistake. Then I got to the graphic torture scene, and decided I hadn't. I can't imagine what audience the author had in mind here. It's too brutal for youngsters, but the characters and plot are so simplistic that they haven't a chance of holding an older reader's serious attention for more than about ten exasperated minutes. I kept reading, in hope of improvement somewhere along the way. My mistake.

The characters are so one-dimensional that they supply a lot of unintended humor. The hero, Wyl, is all good. King Celimus is all evil. He spent his childhood torturing small animals, and now he's spending his adolescence attempting to ravish virgins. And having people beheaded over lunch. The Queen of the neighboring realm, whom Wyl has fallen in love with, is good but easily confused, which leads to a ridiculous ending. The Mountain King is good, but has a really evil advisor, who gets him to do bad things from time to time. Though one would hope that a good person might fire an advisor who suggested cannibalism as a desirable dietary alternative. Just an idea.

Here's a short thought experiment, so you'll see what I mean about the simplistic plot (major spoiler here): suppose you learned recently that if you get killed, your soul goes into someone else's body, and that person dies instead. Suppose that you then find yourself ALONE with the Really Evil King. What might you do? The obvious possibility doesn't even occur to dim-witted Wyl, dooming us to several more volumes of this thing when the story could have ended on page 222 of book 1. I have a strong feeling that Wyl is going to end up in the Evil King's body sooner or later (probably later) anyway.

This novel utterly lacks nuance and believability. You want to like the good characters, but it's just too much of a chore. Save yourself a headache and give this series a pass.
3411029
Mind numbing, cliche, and painfully predictable.

There's the girl, who has a life issue/trauma that sets her apart from everyone else, who has experienced nothing in life and is "innocent" and sweet and everything good - and who has decided to move on and be miss independent, who wants more, but doesn't think anyone is interested because it's just HER... blah blah blah, goes to a frat party with a friend and the heavens move when she looks at a guy. A guy, who is just too perfect for words. The bad-boy who sleeps around and gets what he wants, yadda yadda yadda.

Somehow, there's some miraculous connection between them and while they simply try to be acquaintances with benefits, there's just that perfect feeling between them. Despite hardly knowing each other, the girl falls madly in love.

Naturally, she's also got a stalker. Things happen, the relationship gets tense, and then better, and then tense again. Things are said and done, stalker does his thing, mr. macho "friend" realizes she's not just some girl and how he just has to have her in his life and things go on from there....

Seriously, I got to the last page and I almost choked at how disgustingly mushy it was. Read at your own risk. It's a waste of three bucks.
180397
Uncomfortable on the eyes. Unbearable to read. Badly punctuated. Ghastly. Implausible. Double Exposure makes my brain hurt, in the literary sense.

Okay if you want to read an entire book that sounds like the above paragraph, Double Exposure is for you. I flipped pages just to get to the end so I could find out if the character ever makes it out of the woods. The cold, dark woods. At night. Fog. Leaves crunching underfoot. Men. Pursuing him. Four of them. Cold. Hungry. Tired. Lost. Lonely. Afraid.

BORED!!!

I don't know if the author is trying to be cute, or invent his own style of punctuation. He attempts to write the book in present tense, but sloppily slips back into past in many of his paragraphs. But the most inexcusable element that drove me LITERALLY batty was his method of punctuation. He begins dialog tags with an EM dash, and ends them with...nothing. It isn't cute, it isn't witty, it doesn't make him unique. It's just plain wrong, and it jars the reader (anyone with a second grade grasp of the English language, anyhow) out of the story.

Absolutely unbearable.
Never.
Reading.
Another.
By this author.
Ever.
Again.