Last night I finished Isolation Ward by Joshua Spanogle. (The first half of this Rolling Review was posted on August 7^th.)

The pace picks up in the second half of the book, as our hero Nathaniel McCormick works out his romantic interests and starts to unravel the twisty plot, which is fun and unpredictable. But the pace never reached that racing out-of-control feeling you get with the best big beach books.

There are three main reasons for this, and one of them has nothing to do with the writing itself. The paperback jacket copy says, “A deadly epidemic. A terrifying race against time. A young doctor on the edge…” But there is no epidemic, and consequently no race against time, which may explain a little of the letdown I felt. After the first three illnesses which we learn about in Chapter One, no one else gets sick. The title , of course, also is misleading.

The second problem continues from the first half. The character of McCormick never settles down to become someone we can root for. He analyzes and over-analyzes the things that he says and that others say to him, which helps to develop his character, but at times he’s callow, at others wise, and often just stunningly foolish, as when he receives a videotape containing criminal evidence and he leaves it in his car instead of taking it to the police, or at least putting it back in the unimpeachably safe spot he got it from. Then when it’s stolen he it takes him an inordinate amount of time to realize that the thieves didn’t want the clothes they stole, they wanted the incriminating evidence.

The other problem that diffuses excitement in the second half is that no clear-cut villain comes to the fore. There are no less than seven major characters in the book who are involved in creating or covering up the crimes, five of which are focused on in the second half, and none of them becomes McCormick’s main opponent. So it’s our hero against… several other people. Even the climactic final scene has our hero against… three other people. The conflict is murky when it should be clearest.

I finished this and the suspense at the end was well-done. It’s good - it’s just one of those books that is not as good as the blurbs have made out.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Rolling Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.