Atsushi Watanabe Watanabe itibaren Crévic, Fransa itibaren Crévic, Fransa

Such a sweet story.

** spoiler alert ** Raymond Austin is a long-time (white, male) television director - The Saint, The Avengers, Hawaii Five-O, Hart to Hart, Magnum, P.I., JAG - any of those sound familiar? I started this book, apparently the first in an intended series, favourably impressed. The opening scene, the heist of the title, was very visual, clearly imagined as if for TV, and well described. But as the story went on, I rapidly got sick of the rather self-congratulatory detective and his conventional and occasionally sexist attitudes; the body count was high and descriptions graphic; and Austin rather put the lid on it by deliberately juxtaposing a heterosexual sex scene (the detective and his one-night-stand) with a gay one (though the gay one consisted simply of a kiss in bed, and then one nasty treacherous gay man strangling the other one). I had the identity of the villain - not surprisingly a gay man - figured out well before the surprise revelation. And finally, to put a capper on it, the copy-editing, which seemed quite good at first, deteriorated badly towards the end, as if the last few chapters had been rushed through with all their spelling and grammatical sins on their heads. I ended up feeling, rather sadly, as if I had spent a few hours seeing one of those action-adventure movies I don't really like - or perhaps an episode of a TV show.

Beautiful book!