Any book that can deliver its first dead body within the
first chapter brings on intrigue in my mind.
Dead Men Make the Best Heroes doesn’t disappoint in this regard. I knew by the end of page two that this book
was going to take me on one hell of a ride.
By the middle of chapter three, I knew I was reading a book
by an author who is a master at describing the settings of his story. E. Van Johnson brilliantly pulls his readers
into the world where the characters live.
Fortunately, it’s a talent that he carries extremely well throughout the
entire book.
One of the things that I really liked about this book, and
its story, was that, although most spy / war novels have you rooting for one
side or the other, I really found myself sympathetic to both the Palestinians
and the Israelites. E. Van Johnson was
able to convey why each side was taking the risks that they were taking and
what their true intentions were. I find
it a rare thing for an author to be able to be sympathetic in these types of
novels to both sides of the war and I found the manner in which the story, and
the struggles, of both sides refreshing.
What troubles me about the book is that it does contain some
strange paragraph formatting, but once the reader trains their eyes to ignore
that and just enjoy the story this drops down to being simply mildly
annoying. The many editing errors were far
more distracting, but at the same time, about half way through the book I
decided that the story was well written and intriguing enough that I began forgiving
these flaws as well.
At the end of the day, I really, really wanted to give this book five stars for the story and the
eloquent writing—which is something I very, very rarely ever do. But I also know how critical readers are with
regard to editing and formatting errors.
Therefore, I had to take my love of the story into consideration against
the editing issues. As a result, I give
this book a strong three and ½ stars with encouragement to Mr. E. Van Johnson
to keep on writing such exceptional material but to also, perhaps, take into
consideration the small details that might prevent him from experiencing the
success as an author that he so richly deserves.
No comments:
Post a Comment