Now and then I start reading a book I can’t finish, because it annoys or offends me in some way. Most of the time when that happens, I do not review it. I figure being a bad writer is punishment in itself for the authors of those books.

But sometimes a book really annoys me, and I have to register a protest. I worked my way through about 2/3 of John W. Mefford’s Escape (which I got through a Kindle deal), and I need to vent.

First of all, I doubt that author Mefford cares about my opinion. He seems to be doing very well in book sales. It’s for him to look down on me, as far as pleasing the reader is concerned.

But I found Escape impossible to finish.

Escape is Book 7 in the “Ball and Chain” series. Judging by this particular specimen, it’s about a man and a woman, Cooper Chain and Willow Ball, who are involved in an endless search for Willow’s father. For some reason, which wasn’t apparent in this book. She doesn’t even like him much. Yet they put their lives at risk over and over to follow the obscure clues the old man leaves behind.

Obscure clues. This is the main thing that bothered me. You’re familiar with Hitchcock’s concept of “the Macguffin,” the object, worthless in itself, which becomes the center of the plot because all the characters are after it. (I’ll admit I’ve never entirely understood this. Nothing in a fictional story, including the characters, is of any worth in the real world, because they’re all imaginary). This book is a multiple macguffin story. In which the object of the hunt leaves convoluted puzzle clues that have to be figured out by the heroes. Like the National Treasure movies, which also annoyed me. I raise my barbaric yawp to the world – This never happens in real life. Never. And certainly not repeated times. It’s just a trick by the author to jack the suspense up.

What is worse, the beginning of the book finds our hero in a position in which he obviously was left in a cliff-hanger at the end of the previous book. Which means this book will most likely also end with a cliff-hanger.

I am not going to plow through this implausible plot to be left with a cliff-hanger. That’s an incivility to the reader.

The story starts somewhere in the South (I forget where; numerous insults are slung at southerners as a group), and then follows Ball and Chain to New York City, where a character who used to be their enemy suddenly becomes their friend and they get involved in a side job helping him. It doesn’t make much sense, but this series’ numerous fans seem to like that sort of thing. Bless their hearts, as they say in the South.

I’m out of it. I’ve Escaped.