Saturday, July 28, 2007

Standoff

I just finished "Standoff" by Jeff Downs


The premise is this: The elite crime fighting unit, TOR, has a new enemy. One that is using copy cat crimes to gather intelligence against the unit and copy their sophisticated crime fighting tools. This enemy then intends to use these same tools to defete the TOR unit and inflict mayhem on the world. Unless the TOR unit can figure out the who, what, where and why of the enemy first.

I like this book. It is a small book, only 244 pages, but Jeff packs a lot into those pages. The dialog felt real and I admire that, because dialog is not something I am good at when it comes to writing. The action was never so fast that it was hard to keep up, but the book didn't drag, either. The one LDS character in the book, used his faith to help him in his job, but he was not preachy about it and all the non-members did not end up baptized. They acknowledged his religious convictions and that was it- like his not drinking when the rest of them went to a bar for a celebration, they noted for the new guy that that was the reason "Roach" was not in attendence.

On the side of being truthful, I did have one small gripe, though. While there is only one LDS character, and this is essentially a crime solving novel. In most crime solving of this magnatude, someone dies. However, when one of the good guys gets kidnapped by the bad guys, she is able to disarm them. Ok, believable in the way it happened. But this is where I didn't believe it, she knocked them out and then just tied them up and left them to be found! In real life, in this situation, I think that there would have been more deadly force used. I might be wrong, here, but the magnitude of the crime commited seems to me that just leaving the bad guys laying around for anyone to find seems irresponsible. So the getting rid of the bad guys seemed a little sanitary to me.

But all in all, I liked this book and would recommend it for a quick read.

3 comments:

Janette Rallison said...

Great review. Sounds like an interesting book!

Karlene said...

Did you check this out at the library? Or buy it? I want to borrow if you own it. I don't like the book I'm reading right now. I had such high expectations due to who recommended it, but I got to chapter two and I just cannot make myself finish it.

Sandra said...

I borrowed it from the library. It isn't due for more weeks, so one of the kids can bring it over if you want.

I don't like the one I am reading now, either- uncommon Justice. The story is ok, but everyone,even the women, swear like sailors. I haven't "heard" these words used so much since I left N.M. I am still deciding if I want to know who done it bad enough to wade through every other word being a swear word. Probably not.