Acceleration, by Graham McNamee
Thursday, September 13, 2007 by Faith
Did I like it? Well, that’s a little hard to say. It was well written. The characters were believable. But the plot, well, not so much.
Duncan is spending his summer working in the lost and found section at the Toronto Transit Authority. That sounds more glamourous than it really is, as the majority of his days are spent packing up boxes of unclaimed items to go to the YMCA sale. He snares a cool leather jacket. One day, bored, he picks up a book with no title or author on the cover, and sits down to read. Instead of finding a novel, though, he is horrified to find that it is a journal of a sociopath’s experiments in animal torture, then arson, and his desire to move on to something bigger.
Duncan enlists his friends Vinnie and Wayne to help him track down the book’s author before a murder is committed. In the end, though, the man who Duncan has christened Roach turns up at the lost-and-found, asking for a book that he’d lost.
You know, I kept asking myself whether a sociopath would really go to the lost-and-found department looking for the book in which he’d written down all his bizarre experiments on animals and torture, and in which he’d recorded his plans for attacking a woman next, along with detailed notes on the three women he’d been following. I suppose it’s possible, but it seemed a little unreal to me. Okay, yeah, Duncan did take the journal to the police, who brushed it off as a kid’s summer prank. So he stole it back on his way out of the police station.
This thread was far-fetched enough that it really distracted from my enjoyment of the book. And the descriptions of Roach seemed as though they were taken right out of “Profiling for Dummies.” They were a little too far-fetched, in an already far-fetched book.
So I can’t say I enjoyed the book, but I would be willing to give the author another try.
Duncan is spending his summer working in the lost and found section at the Toronto Transit Authority. That sounds more glamourous than it really is, as the majority of his days are spent packing up boxes of unclaimed items to go to the YMCA sale. He snares a cool leather jacket. One day, bored, he picks up a book with no title or author on the cover, and sits down to read. Instead of finding a novel, though, he is horrified to find that it is a journal of a sociopath’s experiments in animal torture, then arson, and his desire to move on to something bigger.
Duncan enlists his friends Vinnie and Wayne to help him track down the book’s author before a murder is committed. In the end, though, the man who Duncan has christened Roach turns up at the lost-and-found, asking for a book that he’d lost.
You know, I kept asking myself whether a sociopath would really go to the lost-and-found department looking for the book in which he’d written down all his bizarre experiments on animals and torture, and in which he’d recorded his plans for attacking a woman next, along with detailed notes on the three women he’d been following. I suppose it’s possible, but it seemed a little unreal to me. Okay, yeah, Duncan did take the journal to the police, who brushed it off as a kid’s summer prank. So he stole it back on his way out of the police station.
This thread was far-fetched enough that it really distracted from my enjoyment of the book. And the descriptions of Roach seemed as though they were taken right out of “Profiling for Dummies.” They were a little too far-fetched, in an already far-fetched book.
So I can’t say I enjoyed the book, but I would be willing to give the author another try.
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