Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Paper thin characters and a flat plot make this a disappointing novel. It's so bad that I'm kicking myself for wasting money on it. I was sucked in by promising first chapters, which detailed the heist of rare manuscripts from Princeton University's library. But the fun stopped just pages later as the thieves made mistakes not foreshadowed by their meticulous preparation for the heist. The clever, resourceful high tech bad guys suddenly became petty thugs. An unhappy writer/adjunct professor was recruited to help get the manuscripts back. Sounds good, but she could not possibly be more dull. She whines her way through a flat plot, collecting intel on a bookstore owner suspected to having stolen the manuscripts. Even as I'm writing this, I'm thinking, this could have been good! It isn't. It feels like a half-hearted effort to meet a deadline. There is no suspense. There are no plot twists. There is very little resolution. It is impossible to care about any of the characters. Even the setting is off. The story is set in a fictional island near Jacksonville, yet it does not have any of the charm of that area. It reads more like a mash-up of Miami and Cape Cod. Even with its odd beachy juxtaposition of a seaside Ritz Carlton and nearby nesting turtles, it is not worth adding to any list of beach reads.