Andr থেকে Hetsa, Comoros
I am nearly ready to give up on Iris Johansen. Eight Days to Live features Jane MacGuire, the now-young woman who was taken in by Eve Duncan in Johansen's earlier works. The plot keeps things just interesting enough for one to be willing to endure the banal dialogue between nearly all the characters, especially between the principal players: Jane, Seth Caleb and Jock Gavin. Jane is now on the brink of stardom as an artist, with an unusually strong opening in her first solo gallery display. Attention has been drawn to one of Jane's paintings in particular, Guilt, which she painted from her recurring dreams. Apparently, a religious cult believes that she has trespassed against their beliefs and must now face the consequences of those actions. Johansen teases us with laying the groundwork for a truly fascinating character in Jock, but then she manages to hide him even when he is in the scene. We yearn for the development of the relationship between Jock and Jane, or at least more banter between him and the mysterious Caleb. The author does succeed a little in letting the reader appreciate Lina Alsouk, a translator in Switzerland who just happens to keep an AK-47 around for protection. Adah Ziller is intriguing as well, with a history of double-crosses and her power of persuasion--the only trouble is that we only get to know her character after she's dead. One would think that the locales in Eight Days to Live, which include Paris, the Scottish isles, the Swiss Alps and excursions to the Holy Land would yield impressive descriptions. Here again, Johansen fails to even adequately set the scenes, letting the bland characters wallow in their bland surroundings. The plot would draw favorable comparisons to that of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, but there is simply not enough detail or color in this book to come within a couple of brushstrokes of those flawed but enjoyable works.