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Bicycle Shop Murder (2000)

by Robert Burton Robinson(Favorite Author)

3.22 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

143030412X (ISBN13: 9781430304128)

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

Lulu Press

series

Greg Tenorly Suspense Series

review 1: There are the pieces of a credible mystery thriller somewhere in "Bicycle Shop Murder." But this novel is the shoddy product of hasty and unskilled assembly, leading to a frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying reading experience. Author Robert Burton Robinson's self-published debut novel tells the story of two has-been hit men in the employ of a would-be Texas governor, in pursuit of two would-be lovers who know too much about a series of murders in their small Baptist town. As I said, the building blocks of a good thriller are there. But the author would have done well to employ a story editor as well as a copy editor to help draw out and reshuffle the good stuff, for "Bicycle Shop Murder" reads like a rough first draft. The pacing is choppy, the prose is flat, the chara... morecters sometimes act in implausible fashion and too little about why the central conflict exists isn't revealed until the final pages — when the backstory-buried motive spills out in a flood of tedious exposition that should have been parceled out throughout the entire novel. Worse, the reveals happen during that most cliched of all mystery-novel scenes: A longwinded clear-the-air chat between a killer and an intended victim.I normally wouldn't pick on the names of characters, but the ones in "Bicycle Shop Murder" are about the most fake-sounding I've ever heard: Greg Tenorly, Cynthia Blockerman, Buford Bellowin, Angela Hammerly. There's a lawyer named "Kyle Serpentine" and the murder victim of the title is "Sam Spokane." The names clunk on the ear, and thus needlessly distract. Books like "Bicycle Shop Murder" are the reason so many people deride self-published novels, even as more people publish them. By failing to seek out quality critiquing, editing and proofreading, the author not only does his readers a disservice, but does harm to those in the independent publishing community who do go to the trouble of making sure their work gets the same quality torture-testing as a novel before a New York publishing house.
review 2: This was a free download which I read using MobiPocket on my N95. I've given 4 stars but not because it has great literary merit, or because I learnt anything profound from reading it, but because it was fun to read. Some of the characters hover on the edge of believability but then that's what makes them interesting. And those characters are balanced by the very down to earth Greg Tenorly, the somewhat reluctant hero of the story. less

Download links for: Bicycle Shop Murder

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