Getting free book offers for my Kindle has expanded my opportunities for writing snarky reviews. Take No More by Seb Kirby is far from being the worst written e-book I’ve read, but I can hardly recommend it.

James Blake, a London radio executive, comes home to his apartment one day and finds his wife dying just inside the door, shot in the head. Not only can he not imagine why anyone would have killed her, but he didn’t even know she was in town. She was supposed to be in Florence, looking for lost art masterpieces.

Naturally he comes under police suspicion, but he manages to flee to Florence where he discovers that his wife has crossed immensely powerful people, and he soon becomes a target himself.

I’d say the problem with Take No More is that the author is an OK storymaker, but an amateur storyteller. He often commits the sin of having his narrator inform us what other people are thinking, something he can’t know for sure. And the prose is… maddeningly pedestrian. There’s plenty of danger and action, but the words don’t serve the story. It occurred to me that the book read like a second-rate translation – all the words are right, but the music is absent. One of the reviewers on Amazon actually said something about it being originally written in another language, but “Kirby” sounds like an English-speaking name to me.

There was one trick employed for losing a tail that did impress me, though.

Cautions for the usual stuff, but nothing radical. If you can get it free like I did, you might care to give it a try if this sort of thing interests you. Otherwise, I’d say pass.