A thriller that lacks thrill (Plea of Insanity - Jilliane Hoffman)

Member Name: Tracy_1127

Product:	Plea of Insanity - Jilliane Hoffman
Date:	07/11/08 (102 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cheap

Disadvantages: see review

A while ago I read Retribution by Jillianne Hoffman and thoroughly enjoyed it so I stored her name in my memory banks with the intention of reading more of her work. A couple of months ago while browsing in a discount store I saw Plea Of Insanity selling for a £1. I snapped it up feeling immensely pleased with myself, took it home and immediately started to read it.

That's probably the only good point about this book. The cheap price. The main character in the book is Julia Valenciano who is a prosecutor, a relatively new one so not top notch. The crime is a family murder, the wife and three children have been stabbed and the husband, David Marquette, is the suspect. It all sounded quite good at this point.

We begin with the emergency call made by the oldest child just before she is murdered and then move on to the investigation. Firstly Julia is not a character you can feel any empathy for, she is only second seat on this case due to the fact she is sleeping with her boss which does nothing to endear her to the reader. She also lacks depth and it's hard to stay interested in her life.

We flick back and forth for the first portion of the book as she remembers her childhood, her brother killed her own family then got diagnosed as Schizophrenic and David Marquette is claiming to have killed his own family for the same reason. Even the memory italic text sections don't pull you in as you'd expect, they are far too long and don't get to the point quickly enough. Also Julia is prone to panic attacks and these keep slowing down the story in general which again doesn't help.

As we read about the investigation there are factors that the detectives should look into but these are mentioned then ignored. It's almost as if the author was going a different way with the story then changed her mind and omitted to remove these bits of evidence from the text.

Julia discovers her brother is still alive and visits him. The portrayal of a schizoprenic lacked accuracy too, I had a close family member who was a schizophrenic and have met several in my life and the descriptions in this book didn't sit well with me, very stereotypical.

Julia has a dog who means the world to her yet by the last third of the book the dog isn't mentioned anymore and we have no idea where the dog is. When you reach the last section of the book it becomes clear what the author was trying to achieve throughout but she failed miserably and the "twist" at the end is both contrived and completely unimaginative.

The whole book is an erratic mess from start to finish, it's like the author started it then kept leaving it until eventually it needed rushing to get to the publishers. The characters lack any personality, the storyline had potential but turned into an uninteresting drone and the synopsis in the front cover is the most exciting part of the entire 590 pages.

I found it hard to concentrate on this book, not because it dazzled me with it's complexity but because it bored me senseless and was badly written. It took me 2 months to finish it, I gave up twice but then went back to it when I ran out of other books to read. Normally a book this length would take me a couple of days.

I loved her other book I read but this one was so tedious and left so many loose ends at the finish I'm not sure I'll read anything else by this author. I really don't recommend this book at all and it gets one star purely because I have to rate it.

Summary: Not recommended