You don't have to be evil to read this, but it helps. (You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps - Tom Holt)

Member Name: English Lady

Product:	You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps - Tom Holt
Date:	02/03/06 (222 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: some good one liners, interesting idea.

Disadvantages: badly written, confusing, insipid characters

What do you do when you’ve killed of several major characters and sent the two most central ones off to Australia to live out their days as mineral mining millionaires AND you have to write a book in that same series? You base the story at JW Wells but pick out for yourself some new characters, throwing in a few familiar ones for good measure.

Tom Holt had, I believe, written himself a trilogy-concluding book in “Earth, Wind, Fire and Custard” and suddenly found his publishers wanting more. So, in comes “You don’t have to be evil to work here, but it helps.”

Colin Hollinghead is a young lad under-whelmed with motivation, good looks and youthful vitality. He works for his Dad in the family widget-making business which is slowly going down the pan, until JW Wells and co. get involved. Cassie Clay takes on the case and is struck dumb by some un-explicable attraction to young Colin. He is afflicted by the same thing, plus crippling pins and needles too.

Things get very interesting when Colin discovers who his fathers new cost-saving workforce happen to be, and who their new boss is( lets just say he’s the Devil to work for) and starts to ask questions about the tree growing up through their boring, terraced house. As all this is happening, JW Wells themselves are taken over, and nobody can work out by whom, even the ever knowledgeable accountant-cum-Pest controller , Benny Shumway has no clue. And as his long time friend, Connie has just been sacked, his new friend Cassie is showing the symptoms of being madly in love without actually being in love and the door in his office that leads through to the Bank of the Dead is flung wide open, he’s desperate for any kind of information at all.

In fact, I can empathise with the poor bloke, I mean, dwarf. I was desperate to find out what was going on. From the first page I was flung into the unknown and page by page more and more questions were introduced, but none of them seemed to be getting answered. I happily gave Holt the benefit of the doubt at first, but when I was getting to 50, 60, 70 pages in without a clue, I began to get exasperated.

I am patient, I nearly always complete a book I have begun, but this time, I very nearly packed it in. However, I’d already requested it’s addition here, so I kept on reading.
You don’t get many clues at the beginning, but you do get a lot of un-necessary character back story. I know we’re dealing largely with completely new characters, but giving us their personalities and histories in such a big chunk at the beginning of the book, in my mind, is a mistake.

Once the action gets going, this book is okay. I enjoyed reading the middle section and I wish Holt had opted to drop us in to the action, and build up his characters later. This is one problem I find with this author -he’s not a great wordsmith. He has great plots, and interesting twists and turns of imagination, but he lacks skill in putting together the building blocks of a good narrative.

Maybe I’m a lazy reader, maybe I want too much fed to me, but I do not enjoy being confused, and this book kept me confused from start to finish. I don’t mind having some unanswered questions that thread through a novel, but when you introduce so many unknowns and don’t answer any of them till the last twenty pages, you’re going to loose me and confuse me.

Now, I could have forgiven him a bit, if the new characters were interesting, unfortunately, I didn’t like either of them. Colin is a wet squib, not as annoying as the original “hero” of this series, Paul Carpenter, but just as frustrating. He hasn’t got a jot of charisma about him and Cassie is boring and two dimensional. The novel is redeemed a little by Benny and Connie and the brief interludes of other good characters Holt has built up through the last three J W Wells books, which begs the question, why didn’t he write something based around these Characters and avoid the pitfalls of introducing brand new people so late on in a series?

I have one other complaint, which may be something that only ruffles the feathers of fellow Christians, Tom Holt uses some biblical characters and gives them dubious personality traits. It will probably not bother many other people, but I really did not like what translated (to me) as a dig at my faith. Holt often uses classic mythology in his works, and I think this is what annoys me particularly, he takes my faith and uses it like another piece of mythology to play with any way he sees fit. I only mention it as this is my personal review and this is something that bothered me.

I’ve been very negative through this review, haven’t I? I’m desperately thinking of positives to add and I’m coming up with next to nothing. As always Holt pulls off some pretty funny one liners, but nowhere near as many as in “The Portable Door.” the first, and in my opinion, the best of the JW Wells set of books. If you want funny, if you want contemporary and you want fantasy then you’ve got to go to the master, Terry Pratchett. I cannot recommend him highly enough, whereas I cannot recommend Tom Holt at all. He has some great ideas, but he just can’t put a decent novel together, with one notable exception, “The Portable Door.” where I thought his style had matured from a mish-mash of ideas into a great paced, hilarious novel.

If you must read a Tom Holt book, read “The Portable Door.” but leave it at that, none of his others compare to it and “You don’t have to be evil, but it helps.” falls miles short of his best. Wait for this to come out in paperback if you are a Tom Holt fan, because £8.57(Amazon.co.uk) is too much to pay for it. If you’re not a fan, then don’t read it at all, unless you’re a masochist who enjoys headaches.

Summary: Tom Holt's fourth book in the JW Wells series.