Saturday 29 June 2013

JAC WRIGHT - THE CLOSET (2013)

Synopsis/blurb......

Love is a battlefield.  Who will get out of it alive?

Harry Duncan Wood runs a hotel in the historic city of Bath with his beautiful young wife. When he falls in love with Mill House, an old greystone farmhouse on the banks of river Avon among the soaring hills of Somerset, and sets about moving his family there, the first appearances of the cracks in the marriage take him by surprise. Is his wife seeing another man? Duncan needs to get to the bottom of the affairs for his own sanity. Sometimes, however, ignorance is bliss and will also keep everybody alive.

Jac Wright is a published poet, a published author, and an electronics engineer who lives in England. The Closet is the first in Wright's collection of literary short fiction, Summerset Tales, in which Wright explores characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances in the contemporary semi-fictional region of England called Summerset, but with an added element of suspense. The collection is published as a series of individual tales (each tale complete and not serialised) in the tradition of Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers and Thomas Hardy's Wessex Tales. The first Summerset tale, The Closet, accompanies the first title in the author's full-length literary suspense series, THE RECKLESS ENGINEER, published by Soul Mate Publishing, New York.

I got this long short story and four chapter tease for the author’s full length novel which is out soon, in a giveaway/competition draw on Goodreads.

I enjoy broadening my reading horizons and like trying new authors in an effort to keep things fresh in my reading. On this occasion, I enjoyed the short story which was interesting without getting me fully engaged or too concerned about how things ended. Perhaps the trouble with the shorter form of telling tales is that you can provide a history and back story, but it’s still difficult for the reader, or this one at least to make a leap and feel an emotional connection to the characters. So while the end was fairly neat, the story as a whole was akin to rubber-necking at a car crash. You watch, you wince, you gasp.............and then you carry on with your life with barely a backwards glance.

The brief chapters provided as a lead-in to The Reckless Engineer, didn’t draw me in sufficiently to want to add the novel to my wishlist, or for me make a date with my bookseller on publication day.

The author can write for sure, and will win a lot of followers, but for my own personal preference the prose were a little bit too flowery in places – especially the first few pages of The Closet.

3 from 5



2 comments:

  1. Nice review. But this one does not sound like my type of thing.

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    1. Tracy, thanks, I wouldn't put you off it, (if I hadn't already) but I couldn't wholeheartedly endorse or recommend it to be honest. Better stick with a McBain!

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