Review – That One May Smile
That One May Smile, Not My Cuppa
This isn’t a bad review per se, but it isn’t a glowing review, either.
I hate to give bad reviews. Writers pour their hearts into their novels just so snooty readers can come along and poo-poo their hard work.
I love to support indie authors. I’ll be one someday, so I’m all for reading and reviewing, but every once in a while, a book comes along that I just can’t finish, and this was one of them. I find this more often with indie books than I do with traditionally published novels. This, in my opinion, has to do with editing. A good editor is a must-have for any book. I know that finding the right fit can be a battle and that price is a prohibitive hurdle for many, but what a good editor can do for a mediocre book can’t be overlooked.
That One May Smile: A Garda West Novel by Valerie Keogh (now known as The Dublin Murder Mysteries) isn’t a bad book, but it fell short of the mark for me.
Let’s start with what I liked
Keogh crafted some wonderful descriptions and metaphors. I had to smile and reread them when I ran across them. Nothing makes a writer’s day more than finding the right words to place on the page, and Keogh had reason to smile quite a bit.
Since this is a mystery, I expect a few twists and turns, and Keogh doesn’t disappoint. That One May Smile throws a few hairpins at the reader, blindsiding them. One particular piece of great mystery writing came towards the beginning of the book where unkempt and unlikable Sergeant Clark informs lead detective West as to what the phrase “come to good” means. The glib realization thrown at West plastered a silly smile on my face, and for a moment, all the nitpicky irritations I felt melted away.
Now for the hard part.
The bits I didn’t like
Clocking in at 434 pages, That One May Smile is a beast of a cozy-type mystery. I made it all the way to chapter 29 out of 31, and I just couldn’t continue. There was so much unnecessary dialogue, repetition, descriptions, and narration that I felt bogged down.
Keogh nicely relays certain scenes via a secondary character with succinct narration, catching the reader up on what had happened while keeping the pacing of the book. However, some chapters dragged on with too much dialogue, which slowed the narrative to a snail’s pace. I found this to be a major issue with the visits to the horrible wife’s home and to the laboratory to investigate a possible suspect.
Food sums up the problem with over-description. Sometimes what a character orders or eats in books lend to that character’s development. I believe that this is what Keogh is trying to achieve, but all the time spent on food just added to the drudgery. The gathering of ingredients and crafting of the toasted cheese sandwich by Garda West almost made me roll my eyes. What in the world compelled Keogh to spend two pages on a toasted cheese sandwich is beyond me. The word “breakfast” appears no less than 34 times in the book, and 13 of those are in a single chapter. “Breakfasted” appears once. That’s just one meal. Okay, I get it. These are busy people. They don’t have time for grocery shopping or eating regular meals.
Enough about food. On to the repetition
Littered throughout That One May Smile pages are passages like this:
“She turned and walked to the window and stoodlooking out, her tired eyes glazing with tears that prickled and stung before being rubbed vigorously away with an impatient rub of her hand.”
This sort of word repetition within a single sentence runs rampant throughout That One May Smile, and it drove me crazy. No one is a perfect writer. I know I’m rubbish at it most of the time, but that’s why writers need good editors. I tried to look up who had edited That One May Smile, but I found no acknowledgments at the end of the novel. I want to reprimand them for a subpar job. This book was right on the edge of stellar. It’s too long, didn’t use its time wisely, had issues with word usage, and had unuseful dialog. However, I did find much I loved, I just wish I’d loved more.
My opinion is my own and should be taken with a skosh of sand. If you like complex mysteries with a slight romance budding in the background, this might be the book for you.
