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I’ve decided on a rating system for my reviews, finally. What to expect: Title/Author/Genre/Edition (duh) Buy it/Borrow it/Bury it- in other words; Highly recommend, Marginally recommend or recommend for certain people only and Don’t recommend. 

Writing (readability), Characters, Plot, Ending (others as needed): A-F scale, just like school, complete with pluses and minuses. Things that may pop up if relevant or interesting: Best/Worst line, Best/Worst character, Sequels/Prequels, Mood, Age group (not that I am an expert), Re-readability, Cover art, etc. There will also be a final/overall GPA, just like school.   Joy! 

Remember that episode of The Simpsons when the teachers go on strike (title: The PTA Disbands season 6, if you care) and Lisa runs into the kitchen in full panic-mode screaming “Look at me! Grade me! Evaluate and rank me! I’m good, good, good and oh so smart!” Yep, that’s me.

*Note, this will be adapted to movies, music, people, places, minerals, vegetables or whatever else I decide to review.   

I love the Cambridge University Press.  Just thought I’d throw that in there.  Actually I love all university presses.  Because I am a NERD. Moving on, this book is full of lovely little articles on some of the eccentricities of the English language.  Quirky things like blending, yod dropping, the creation and death of affixes, suffixes and -ixes of all kinds, all kinds of fun stuff. 

This is mighty odd considering I HATED the required linguistics courses I took for my anthro degree. It was a fun book, read in fits and starts, as it was meant to be.  All the articles were taken from her radio show, so none are long and all are easy to read.  She is an Aussie, so a few of her references are a little outside my American head, but she is really quite readable.  It amazing there aren’t more linguists with such a knack.  

Highly recommend.  You get lots interesting trivia to entertain your friends-Did you know that gradable adjectives of more that two syllables are losing or have already lost their ending?  For example- we still say big, bigger and biggest, but not beautifuller or beautifulest. We used to say such things, the author brings up Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare as examples (’curiouser’ and ‘horrider’) even one syllable adjectives may lose their endings in the future.  Interesting, no?  

I still haven’t set a standard for how I’m going to review books yet, so we’ll go with the standard star method.  4 1/2 stars.

Title: 1st to Die

Author: James “I’m stinking rich off America’s lack of taste” Patterson

ISBN: 0446610038

Readable: 4th grade- nothing too complicated or with too many syllables, although the cliches and cliff…

hangers could damage fragile, developing minds.

Characters: Cardboard, contrived, totally unbelievable.  But who needs characters with souls when you have BadPlot Twistpants as your author?

Plot: A little Crossing Jordan, a little Law and Order and a bit o’ Lifetime Movies and Boom!  You’ve got an uber dramatic, soap opera dish sprinkled with “I’m just here ’cause people like CSI” forensic stuff, and drowned in twists so snakeish that you don’t see them coming until they bite you in the ass,- with four foot long fangs that penetrate your colon, causing the intelligent reader to shout, “WTF- where did that come fr- Ow! My gut!  This senseless cut and paste plot is killing me!”

Verdict: Blech, good for doorstops and bored reading on the plane, when you’re not really concentrating because your eyes are mysteriously drawn to the bushy eyebrowed guy across the aisle. 

I’m in a mood today, can you tell?  Moving on, this book didn’t sit very well with me. I honestly felt as if I was reading a script for one of the thousands of CSI knock offs that appear every other day.  Grisly, violent crimes, complete with peeks into a psychotic mind that have to be solved by a tough hard working cop/scientist/lawyer with tons of insight, a heart of gold and a messed up personal life that somehow ends up the killer’s target. 

Meet Lindsay, a tough, hard working cop with tons of insight, a heart of gold and a messed up personal life.  She has bullied her way into homicide as a detective and doesn’t take any crap from ‘the boys.’  She has a dog and lives in an incredibly expensive townhouse in San Francisco, and never worries about money. 

While going after the bloody psycho with the bad childhood, we hear about her terribly boring childhood- disappearing dad, dead mom, etc.  Then she joins together a motley crew of women, a reporter, a lawyer and a medical examiner into a ‘murder club,’ which doesn’t mean what it sounds like, unfortunately.   They are trying to solve the murders in painful scenes that scream ‘Man trying to write as a female and failing miserably.’  Patterson doesn’t do too bad with on woman on her own, but  he has no grasp on the female group dynamic whatsoever. 

And really, what cop or lawyer will chat about ‘unreleased details’ to a reporter?  Especially one they just met!  How does she earn their trust so quickly you ask?  By sneaking in to the crime scene!  Afterwards, a cheesy, sickening speech about how she just wants the killer off the streets seems to get her an all access pass to the crime solving team.  Ri-damn-diculous!

Anyway, Despite all the bad, bad characters, I actually wanted to see who they killer was, so I plowed through it, skipping the crappy romance and all the “I’m going to die from this horrible disease” crap Lindsay moaned about (not to mention the moment she becomes the killer’s target).  Finally, the end, twistified and seemingly well thought out, until he added a completely unnecessary and totally unbelievable final scene that made me want to hurl. 

The short version- this book is incredibly overdramatic, manipulative, boring and takes itself way too seriously.  Like almost everything else I’ve read in this genre, the plot was overblown and the charaters unsympathetic and badly written.  Disappointing.