Review: 'Killing Cupid' by Mark Edwards and Louise Voss

I don't quite know what to make of this. I wasn't much impressed with the only other book I've read by these authors, 'Catch Your Death', which had a great premise and some high-energy action, but suffered from poor characterisation and implausible plot devices. So it crossed my mind that this book might turn out to be a mistake. It's cheap, however, and the writing is competent enough, and on certain levels I found it enjoyable.

It's unusual to have two authors, but this book is perfect for it. The two characters, Siobhan and Alex, have alternate chapters, both written in the first person, and I presume that Mark Edwards wrote Alex and Louise Voss wrote Siobhan (although perhaps it would be more interesting if it were the other way round). Alex is perhaps the more convincing character. He comes across as a very believable young man of a certain type - socially inept, self-centred, arrogant but also insecure, and thinking about sex the whole time. Or perhaps I should say, he conforms to my idea of young men of a certain type; I don't really have a clue whether this is an accurate portrayal of the male psyche, but it seems convincing enough to me.

Siobhan is a little less believable. She's required to fulfil the role of self-confident older woman (in Alex's eyes), while also being quite timid and insecure, and it's an uneasy juxtaposition. In particular, when Alex starts stalking her, she is remarkably slow to realise what is going on. She is obsessively tidy, for example, yet she convinces herself that she left things scattered around her house, rather than remembering the missing key and realising straight away that someone had broken in. And you have to be peculiarly dense to imagine that you could order expensive lingerie online and not remember it. But it's a small point.

One thing makes me a little uncomfortable. Because we can see inside Alex's head, we know that he means Siobhan no harm. He is, in his twisted little way, courting her. He sends her flowers and lingerie and expensive clothes. OK, he breaks into her house and uses her credit card to do it, but still... She is freaked out but she also thinks - well, he's kind of cute. Wrong. There's nothing romantic or cute about a man stalking a woman. It's just creepy. Even if the point is that he's superficially normal and there's a psychotic nutter inside all of us (a fairly questionable premise, but never mind), it's still creepy, and no rational woman, surely, is going to be turned on by it. Well, not in real life, anyway, but this is fiction, and there does seem to be a huge demand for books with creepy stalker-type heroes, especially the blood-sucking type, so what do I know.

And oddly, as the plot burbles along, it actually begins to feel quite plausible. Alex's instant distraction by another woman (and sex!) is perfectly in character, and even Siobhan's slide from freaked out victim to angry obsession seems no more than mildly odd. She already has an obsessive personality after all. And each little step along the way seems, if not exactly natural, then at least not such a stretch from what went before. I would probably have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been constantly wondering - would a real person actually behave that way?

In the end, it never quite worked for me. I could admire the carefully thought out plot and the neat little twists and turns at just the right places, but the characters never quite came alive for me and the story was just a little too laboured at times. I see what the authors were trying to do and I admire the attempt to rationalise just how a couple of seemingly normal people can end up in that situation, but I'm not quite sure what position the reader is expected to take - sympathise? be horrified? be amused? or simply feel there but for the grace of God and all that? Are we really supposed to empathise with people who do this kind of stuff? I'm all for the anti-hero and likeable villains and so on, but these two are fairly charmless. An interesting idea, but for me, ultimately unsuccessful. Three stars.

Review: 'Catch Your Death' by Louise Voss and Mark Edwards

This was a cheap ebook, and, as always, it's a bit of a gamble. Some are brilliant, some are awful, this was just a bit meh. There is a cracking story in here somewhere, but the authors have buried it under a positive mountain of cardboard cutout characters and unbelievable plot contrivances. The premise of mysterious goings-on at a research facility, ostensibly working on the common cold but actually up to something far more devious, is an intriguing one, and the plot rattles along at a good pace. But somehow, it never quite works.

The main characters are completely flat. Kate is meant to be a highly intelligent scientist but, frankly, she comes across as pretty stupid, not to say flighty. Paul is entirely nothingy. The bad guys are over-the-top cartoon characters. The minor characters are one-dimensional. The technique of allowing pretty much everyone to have a shot at being a point of view character, which should give them greater depth, actually manages to make them less interesting. In Sampson's case, seeing exactly what is going on in his head makes him less scary - Hitchcock understood that very well - and it removes a great deal of the tension by revealing pretty much everything that's going on. Even so, there's still pages of detailed explanation necessary at the climax of the book.

Vernon is a classic example of a missed opportunity. The authors could have made him a much more sympathetic character - Kate must have seen something in him at one time, after all, and he's described as being intelligent - but no, instead he's a one-dimensional bad-tempered misogynist whose only function is to be a mini bad guy early on and to create the dramatic climax by hiding away with Jack (and miraculously turn into a nice guy for the happy ending - bleah).

As far as the plot goes, there are a few moments of cleverness - the business with swapping the two boys is nicely done - but there are too many coincidences and contrivances all the way through. The car chase sequence is quite ridiculous. A stag? Oh please... And what was the point of the shotgun in the boot? There were moments, too, when I was distracted by some of the historical details. Would Paul really have been able to use a PIN and card to get £1000 from a cash machine in 1989, for instance?

There was one other aspect that grated on me, and that was the crude sexual descriptions. Sampson's fantasies I could live with (he's barking, after all), but Kate's panting lust felt all wrong, somehow. I couldn't quite see what the authors were aiming for. Sexual tension is a great driver, but that doesn't mean telling us every physiological response in Kate's body. It's not romantic or erotic, and frankly distracts from the thriller part of the story. It would have been far more effective and subtle to keep Kate and Paul's relationship in a more enigmatic state.

But overall, the story is moderately readable, with a nicely dramatic (if overdone) climax, and if you can overlook the flaws it's quite a page-turner. I'm feeling generous, so I've given it 3 stars for effort. [First written August 2011]