THE CONFESSOR.

THE CONFESSOR by MARK ALLEN SMITH.

SOURCE: A giveaway win courtesy of I Want A Free Book Every Month (May 2014). THE BOOK {According to the back cover}: The hunt is on to locate Geiger. But is anyone prepared for what will happen if they find him?


Known for his innate ability to recognise lies, and his persuasive methods of making people talk, Geiger was the best of the best in the field of Information Retrieval. Until he was asked to break his only rule. Something cracked in Geiger's neatly controlled mind, opening a flood of terrible memories long kept at bay. And now Geiger is missing, presumed dead.


But with no body ever found, there are a number of people invested in finding out the truth. One of those is Harry Boddicker, Geiger's old handler and friend. Another is his bitter rival, Dalton, who is determined to extract a final confession before carrying out his deadly revenge. But no one has reckoned on Zanni Soames - a woman more dangerous than any of them, and hell-bent on getting to Zeiger first.

FIRST SENTENCE {Prologue}: He could see his indistinct reflection in the laptop's screen - a diaphanous face imprisoned behind the dense thicket of words.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 24}: He'd fallen asleep in the folding chair on the fire escape outside his fourth-floor walkup on Henry Street in Chinatown - the perch where he now observed life on Planet Earth. He could have been a gargoyle on a ledge peering down at the shifting, joyful madness.

MY THOUGHTS: Though I couldn't put my finger on quite what it was for the first hundred or so pages I felt there was something I just wasn't entirely getting about this book. However it wasn't until having written my draft review and read some other reviews that I discovered that The Confessor was in fact part two in a series - the first being The Inquisitor. Something that could have explained my feeling that something was amiss? Who knows?

Anyway, call me old fashioned but I kind of like my heroes to be heroes (even if they are slightly flawed) and my villains to, likewise, be villains, none of this anti-hero business.

Every inch what I'd describe as an anti-hero, Geiger is an Information Retrieval specialist (a politically correct term for a torturer who excels in getting information out of people) who despite the author exploring his tormented past remained an unbelievably mundane character to read.

Not that it was only Geiger I found to be tedious, equally mundane was the writing. Painfully slow and plodding, I'm afraid that I constantly found my mind wondering.