This Tucker Doesn't Whet the Appetite!

I really wanted to like Buddy Lock, both because I delight in finding new authors and the premise for him sounded interesting in Tucker’s debut novel. Sadly for me there were too many weaknesses in this to make it very enjoyable even though I’m normally happy to give authors plenty of creative license. The story opens with the brutal and gory murder of a family during a New year’s celebration and is certainly fast-paced throughout. If you can overlook the things that bothered me you may well enjoy it.

However, while I quite liked a lot about the Buddy character the way that he and his behaved was very shallowly slave to the plot. Buddy develops an undying fatherly love for a boy he spends scant hours with and while claiming that certain people meant everything to him he continually put them at obvious and unrealistic levels of risk. There is a lot of woodenness in the other characters too, his girlfriend asks “Is there any danger?” and believes Buddy when he says “no”. She then doesn’t bat an eyelid when he moves furniture to block the door to her apartment and gives a ten year old boy a lesson in the various dirty techniques involved in self-defence . . . We all draw the line at different points when it comes to the amount of realism we need in our books and I’m afraid for this kind of book Tucker crossed mine.

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