To Hell and Gone in Texas

Reviewed on behalf of The Review Board 🙂

BY RUSS HALL

Crime Thriller

I received a free mobi copy of this book, in exchange for an honest review.

Al is a retired detective who is pulled back into business when someone makes an attempt on his estranged brother’s life. Various agencies join the fun in this crime thriller, and soon things escalate way beyond anything Al or the Sheriff’s department could have foreseen. We have shoot outs aplenty, helicopter chases, and a romantic thread that has nothing to do with Maury, Al’s rake of a brother.

This book has all the elements of an exciting and rip-roaring read. Unfortunately, it didn’t do it for me. The characters felt too one dimensional, and the crises all seemed to resolve themselves way too easily. Characters appeared to have been killed, only to end up being resurrected again. The plot didn’t have any twists or turns for me to get my teeth into, and is more of a shoot-em-up kind of a book.

The writing could be tightened up, with much fewer delaying actions (overusing “began tos” and “started tos”), less filter words (he knew/heard/saw/etc.). It is also passive in nature with the use of “wases” and “weres”, etc. Certain stock phrases are overused, such as “pretty much”, as is the word “own”. All of this made it a more tedious read than it needed to be.

One of my pet hates is descriptive dialogue tags that tell instead of show, or worse still, tell what is already shown. Some real humdingers can be found in this book, like: Bonnie bubbled on, and: she gushed.

All of that said, the plot is cohesive and the pacing good. The characters could be padded out more, but they are believable enough.

This book gets 7 out of 10 TRB stars, which translates into 3.5 out of 5 stars on other rating scales.