Genesis Secret Book

Terrible!!!! Can I please, please, please have those hours back?

The only reason I finished this book was remembering what Stephen King said in his book, On Writing, that you can learn more about writing from bad books than good books sometimes and I wanted to be able to think about why it was so bad. And it was baaaaaaaaaaaad.

Really wish I hadn't finished it because it was gruesome, grisly, and gratuitously horrifying!

Things that went wrong:
1) Neutral to unlikable main character. Seems like an idiot. Doesn't put his family first. Has little personality. He's a generic journalist. Yawn-fest.

2) Sagging middle of the book. Got boring and had to push through.

3) Characters making leaps of logic and connection that made absolutely no sense in order to advance the plot.

4) REALLY, REALLY awful torture/murder scenes that will leave you feeling yucky. I never want to be in the POV of the person being tortured and murdered. And if I was, at least make it realistic to the amount of pain they'd be in. Trust me, you'll feel sick and sorry for having read some of these scenes.

5) Speaking of unrealistic-this author must not have kids. He is SOOOO clueless about how people with children would really act. His ex-wife would NOT be happy his very new girlfriend showed up on his doorstep and wants to spend time with their daughter. She would be angry and protective of her daughter, not become chums with her. His daughter doesn't act right. He doesn't act in a very fatherly way and doesn't seem to put his daughter first.

6) Speaking of unrealistic part 2-one of the characters isn't traumatized by the end of the book. How could this be???? Unrealistic part 3-why does the character Christine even fall for the main character? She's too smart for him and he's not very redeeming!

7) The main character NEVER does anything to save himself. In fact, by being an idiot, he endangered everyone else. He doesn't figure things out, he doesn't act like a hero. He just stumbles around stupidly putting himself into dangerous situations and always and I mean every single time, getting saved by someone else. The police, a Kurd, his girlfriend, the police again, etc. Arggghhhh! He is good at checking his email and staring at his phone.

8) Lame, lame, lame "secret" at the end which is given to us in a massive info dump. Page after page of text in quotations (who talks like that?) with the main character monologue-ing. And monologueing to the person who actually saves him. Oooo, you figured out the puzzle dude. Who cares? The action/climactic scene is over. The puzzle was stupid and the other guy had to save you.

Unless you want to analyze the ways that books go wrong, (and I think I hit most of them here already for this book) do yourself a favor and RUN away from this book.

I agree with another reviewer. Pick up a James Rollins book if you want fun action/adventure.