Reading Meme Day 05

Day 05: A book you hate

I'm going to be honest. I don't "hate" very many books. Most books, even if I don't enjoy them, I am willing to say it just wasn't my thing and move on. That being said, there are a couple that just made me angry to read. I have a minor OCD tick in that I can't start a book and not finish. I just can't. And when I'm reading a book that I think is ter

rible, I can't put it down and walk away. Which makes me angry. There are a couple of these that I could choose from, but some of them could show up later in the Meme, so I'm picking one for each slot.

Conspiracy in Kiev by Noel Hynd

A shrewd investigator and an expert marksman, Special Agent Alexandra LaDuca can handle any case the FBI gives her. Or can she?

While on loan from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Alex is tapped to accompany a Secret Service team during an American Presidential visit to Ukraine. Her assignment: to keep personal watch over Yuri Federov, the most charming and most notorious gangster in the region.

Against her better judgment---and fighting a feeling that she's being manipulated---she leaves for Ukraine. But there are more parts to this dangerous mission than anyone suspects, and connecting the dots takes Alex across three continents and through some life-altering discoveries about herself, her work, her faith, and her future.

I got the book through a promotional free download from Amazon's Kindle website, and in preparing this post I discovered that Noel Hynd is carried by the Christian publishing house Zondervan. I mention this because the book made me so mad in its awfulness that I wanted to find out if it was, in fact, put out by a mainstream publishing house or instead was a self-published or vanity press kind of set up.

It was bad. The writing was terrible, the story was slow and full of plot holes (I spent a great deal of time yelling "WHY???" in frustration), and the characters are shallow and one-dimensional. That doesn't even bring in the fact that half the minor details in the book were wrong, like the author did some half-baked attempt at research on Yahoo search and called it good.

As an example, the protagonist finds herself in Venezuela, hiding in the jungle, when a diamondback rattlesnake crawls up her leg and she is forced to hold her gun in front of her face and shoot it off her chest. Not only did this snake appear in a part of the world where it shouldn't be, but the protagonist did not have any sort of deafness, blindness, or burns resulting from firing a weapon two inches from her face. Oh, she had thought to herself that if she missed she would only have 2 or 3 seconds to realign the shot and try again. Really?!?