Spare Ammo

[reblogged from 38 Caliber Reviews]

You know what’s wrong with ebooks? You can’t throw them across the room or out the window, you can’t drop them into the litter box, you can’t drop kick them to the middle of the driveway and incinerate them with your handy-dandy flamethrower. No, you can’t and this can lead to a great deal of frustrated hostility.

Like now.

“From opening paragraph all the way to the very end, Error Code is a non-stop romp of page-turning fun.” No it isn’t. Our heroine, Autumn Winter, is a shallow, frivolous, petty character in love with herself and of the opinion that she is just ever so much smarter than most of the human race. Ostensibly she is an interior decorator and happily married housewife but Autumn has another career, one that she throws out cutesy little hints about until she and The Gladiator clash in the kitchen.

“As we go along, you’ll no doubt figure out that I am
what some may view as sassy, what others may interpret as a fun version of
arrogant, and what a chosen few will come to know as dangerous. At my core and
within this beautiful shell is a woman who’s still vulnerable like any other—only
I possess special skills that allow me to assert my intellect and thus even the
playing field. And the playing field—along with the players thereon—sometimes
need kinetic adjustments to make things right in this world. In fact, Jack and
I believe that there are many things in life that need these so-called adjustments,
and we see it as our purpose—our calling even—to do our part in helping said
adjustments along. I suppose that you could say we’re sorta chiropractors of
fate.” Error Code

Ye-ah. If you read this, and I strongly recommend you don’t, then you will realize that Autumn is a very unreliable narrator. On top of being shallow, frivolous, petty, not too bright, and morally challenged Autumn also says “anyfanny” instead of anyway. Isn’t that just so cute? NO. It gets old by chapter two. Her only redeeming quality is that she seems to love her dog, but I’m not sure that what she defines as love for her husband is anything more than Autumn finding someone she can dominate and feel superior to.

“Having heard myself just say that, it makes me realize that those kinds of contrasts are what make Jack and I such a great team- that and the fact that he bends to my will … as all men should.” Autumn, Error Code. Her husband calls her Aut-six as in thirty-aught-six. Her father called her Instant Pudding. I have a few choice names for her myself. “I’m not a dumb person. At least from what you know of me so far, I’d hope you’d agree that I possess– along with beauty and wit– at least an average level of intellect.” Uh, no.

So here’s the plot- sort of. Autumn and Jack, her husband, move into a lovely house and Autumn proceeds to decorate it. The only flaw is the dishwasher which seems to project weird error messages and beep or chirp or something. Now any sane person would look at this still under warranty appliance and call her landlady and apprise her of the problem. Not Autumn though, oh no, she waits and pouts and resists and finally lets her husband call the landlady because that means she didn’t lose the battle of wills with the dishwasher. She drops her phone into dishwater but doesn’t think about replacing it immediately, like when she takes her hubs to the airport.

There is always the internet but when trouble comes calling our Autumn acts like one of those 70s gothic heroines trapped in a moldering mansion on a lonely moor. Alone without any means to summon help. She doesn’t even check trouble for a cell phone when she gets the chance, just spends a paragraph or several bemoaning the fate that has left her alone.

And my biggest problem with Autumn- she has no idea where her gun is. It’s still somewhere in the boxes left to unpack. The Chiropractor of Fate has misplaced her gun. I’ve moved several times and I know exactly where my weapons are.

Yes, this is fiction but come on, try. This book is listed on Amazon in both humor & satire and mystery, suspense, thriller and it misses in both categories. The plot revolving around the dishwasher is weak, absurd, and secondary to a group of shallow, almost one dimensional characters that are neither humorous or lethal. The author also needs an editor and a dictionary.