Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Unfortunately, “All He Has Left” was disappointing. I had been hoping for a good thriller. What I found was a poorly written story that strained credulity at every turn. High school football coach Jake Slater is married to Sarah, the daughter of rich, powerful Lars Kingston who has always hated Jake for being not good enough for his daughter. On the drive home one night, Jake, Sarah, and their daughter, 11-year-old Piper, are hit by a truck that flees the scene. Sarah is killed. Jake and Piper survive. Grief-stricken, Jake turns to drink and loses his job after drunkenly punching a referee during a game. Lars attempts to gain custody of Piper in a bruising court battle but fails, Jake having stopped drinking. One night, Piper visits her aunt Caitlin (Lars’s daughter). A man shoots Caitlin dead and absconds with Piper just as Jake arrives to pick Piper up. Jake chases the man but loses him and returns to the scene. The police detain Jake. Desperate to find Piper, he escapes and the hunt for Piper is on. While there’s tons of conflict here—essential for any good story—the characters are so thinly drawn and so cliched that it’s really tough to believe in them, much less care about them. We’re not shown very much about the various worlds they inhabit or how they operate in those worlds. For example, we learn very little, if anything, about coaching high school football or managing investments or law enforcement--the specifics of which could have helped mightily to reveal the characters and bolster their credibility. In fact, errors regarding police and FBI policy and procedure are glaringly obvious (not to mention unbelievably coincidental). Jake is able to escape police custody by faking nausea? A 13-year veteran of the FBI, who once was Jake’s lover, now investigates Caitlin’s murder at the behest of her boss with whom she was romantically involved, where the FBI has little if any basis for taking on the case (since no federal law seems to have been broken)? And the prose is far from a pleasure, filled as it is with questionable word and grammar choices, a wholesale reliance on unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, and figures of speech and cliches. Not to mention that there's more than one "backstory dump." As a matter of fact, there's actually a backstory within a backstory. By the end of Chapter 8, some 50 pages in and more than a quarter of the way through, I had finally had enough. Amazon “First Readers” may well want to skip this in favor of another selection.