Sometimes I read a book and I think, “This writer is following a formula.” Following a formula can even work, depending on how the writer fills in the blanks.

One Wilde Night by Patrick Logan works, but only on a technical level.

Tommy Wilde, our hero, has a PhD in biochemistry, but ended up running a crime scene clean-up business. He works mostly at night. He’s training a new employee one night when he gets a call for help from his loser brother Brian, a drug addict. Tommy runs to meet him – at their church – where Brian is panicking over the body of a drug dealer. The dealer – Brian says – just dropped dead. Not his fault.

Due to an overwhelming sense of obligation, Tommy helps Brian dispose of the body, while eluding the drug dealer’s associates. Or so he thinks. In fact, this is just the beginning of a long, long night in which Tommy will be beaten up, kidnapped, threatened and physically mutilated.

There’s a template for writing a thriller. Start by putting your character in a bad situation, then make it steadily worse. Turn every step forward into two steps back.

Author Logan dutifully follows this template. The problem is that at some point, if you raise the stakes enough, you start losing credibility. Everybody has bad nights, but nobody’s nights go that bad in this many ways. This is the sort of story logic you find in a thriller movie, but in a book the audience has more time to reflect and ask themselves, “Do I believe this?”

Even worse, One Wilde Night never really resolves any of Tommy’s problems. It ends in a cliff-hanger. In other words, what we have here isn’t even a whole story. It’s just the first chapter of a story.

And sure enough, there’s a whole series of Tommy Wilde stories to follow.

But I ain’t reading them.

I should note that the church and their priest come out looking good here, so the author at least seems friendly to Christianity. However, he also drops a whole lot of f-bombs.

All in all, not recommended.