Reading Rip-Off

Iris Johansen is one of my preferred storytellers, especially the stories about one woman’s (Eve Duncan) search for the remains of her daughter, Bonnie, who was kidnapped and apparently murdered when she was 7 years old. One of the police officers attached to the investigation of Bonnie’s disappearance is Joe Quinn, a loner who falls hard and fast for Eve. Eve eventually uses her artistic ability to reconstruct faces from skulls, an ability that allows other families to have closure after the remains of their missing children are found. However, Eve’s quest for closure about the loss of her daughter remains elusive.

Johansen's trilogy allegedly finishes telling the stories of Eve, Joe and Bonnie, a trilogy that began with Eve and continues with Quinn. Last night, I finished Quinn, but it was challenging to do so. Johansen usually tells a good story, maintains a smooth, quick pace from beginning to end, and engages the reader in the resolution of the conflict. Not so in Quinn, a story that drags endlessly to a non-resolution designed to guarantee future sales of the final book, Bonnie, on sale October 18, 2011. While a cliff-hanger may work for TV series, it falls flat at the end of a novel, especially when it’s no longer about Eve, Quinn, or Bonnie, but Catherine.

Yes, that’s right: Catherine, a woman whose son Eve helped save from a dastardly villain and who feels that she owes Eve a favor in return. Thus, Catherine goes into the forest to hunt down suspects in Bonnie’s murder, leaving Quinn in the hospital and Eve refusing to leave him until he’s able to walk out on his own two feet, which really goes against her crusading character. Bonnie, the spiritual incarnation, appears to Joe, to Eve, to John Gallo – oh, you don’t know John? Well, he’s the co-protagonist of Quinn, Eve’s sexual partner when she was a mere 16-years’ old, a liaison that resulted in Bonnie’s birth, but also, perhaps, Bonnie’s abductor and murderer.

Yeah, you got it: Quinn has little to do with Joe Quinn, but everything to do with Johansen's next series. Instead of reading about Joe Quinn, the reader has to slog through Catherine and John's physical sparring, martial arts matches, and budding sexual attraction while endlessly stalking one another in the woods. The chase is boring; the dialog is unbelievable; the sexual tension is gratuitous; and Joe Quinn is a negligible character in the book with his name!

Okay, so I anticipated the resolution of the Eve/Bonnie/Joe storyline, but never as a gimmick to start another series featuring Catherine Ling and John Gallo! Two books into what I thought would be the resolution, Johansen is using that tease to keep going and going and going. From page 216 through the end on page 374, it’s Catherine and John Gallo: Eve and Joe are barely incidental to all those pages! I’m disappointed and, frankly, don’t give a hoot about either Catherine or John Gallo because all I wanted – in one well-written final book – was to resolve Eve’s quest to bring her daughter home.

Although I prefer to hold hard-cover tomes in my hands, to turn the pages one by one as I share the adventure with the fictional characters, I will forgo purchasing the final book in the trilogy until it comes out in paperback. I don’t care about either Catherine or John Gallo, so I don’t want to wade through another 370+ pages to find out (1) if Bonnie is still alive or (2) her remains are finally returned to Eve for burial or (3) who dunnit. As for following the Catherine/John storyline, nah, not going to do that either because I don't like being played by pretending to write the resolution to one series to start another.