Critical Mick

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Reviews by the Clown that All Other Critics Want to Strangle with a Black Turtleneck

A Dangerous Business
Michael Underwood
Macmillan, 1990

Why bother?

The late Michael Underwood wrote over 40 crime novels over the course of his career. My guess is that A Dangerous Business was composed from his dustiest editing-floor scraps. The mish-mash of characters and scenes is certainly fixed together with prose as bland as paste.

There are descriptions of necks snapping "like twigs," and the intrepid heros try to fit the pieces together "like a jigsaw puzzle." 'Nuff said.

Cliches aside, let's move on to the main character. Rosa's supposedly a solicitor, but we never actually see her in the courtroom. Her investigations read like an excerpt from a different novel about a private I. She becomes involved in no subplot, surrounds herself with only one mildly-interesting supporting character, and progresses the plot with an ESP-like leap of deduction that Carl Lewis would be proud of. In short: utterly unconvincing. Reminiscent of what some teenager would hammer out over the weekend, minus any entertaining sex or violence. I can't believe that a professional author would produce something so weak and colorless.

The author's final mistep? No, it's not the flailing octopus of loose ends. It's the fact that Rosa does not actually solve the crime. She sits there passively while the baddie reveals himself at the end of the book for no good reason. It's uninvolving. It's woeful.

So my question is: Why did the publishers bother? The only "Dangerous Business" here is the sorry attempt to make a few bucks selling this pile of muck.

No stars. Just a jug of paste and pocket lint.

Critical Mick don't like A Dangerous Business. Not one little bit.

Yo! This review and all content on the DFA Guide site are copyright 2005 Mick Halpin. All links to other sites and documents are copyright to whatever source wrote something cool enough for Mick to give it a referral. Try to claim them as your own work and bad karma will catch up with you, baby. Believe it.

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This Page Was Last Updated On 17 June, 2005.