Incredulous

This is going to be a bit of a rant today, which will be of no interest to you unless you have read the book that I have just finished. So apologies in advance. Anyway…

I just finished reading 'Want to Play?' by PJ Tracy (which incidentally is a mother/ daughter writing team). This plot in this book is described as “an elderly couple are found dead in a Wisconsin church, shot dead and then mutilated. In St. Paul, Minnesota a serial killer is copying murders from an online computer game. As St. Paul detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth investigate the killings, Magozzi finds himself drawn to one of the suspects. Neither is yet aware of a link to the killings in Wisconsin, and a string of unsolved killings 10 years before.”

Anyway, as I've said, what I am going to write is likely to make no sense unless you have actually read the book, but I need to rant about it anyway. I thought this was one of the most preposterous stories I have read in years! I will try and explain why without giving away the entire plot of the book. Basically we learn there is a serial killer on the loose and soon it seems that the killer is copying a computer game that has been on the internet briefly for testing. Who can the killer possibly be? But as the story unfolds we learn that the people who wrote the game were themselves on the run from a serial killer who years ago brutally murdered several people and left one of the main characters so scared that she has had her whole house wired up to prevent even the smallest possibility of it being able to harbour a killer and she carries a gun, never goes out after dark and so on. So what does she decide to do? Write a game which consists of twenty different scenarios where people are brutally killed - they even re-enact the killings – and then market this as a fantastic game for people to play. You wouldn’t write a game that trivialises serial killing – and you also wouldn’t do something that would potentially draw your own serial killer to you who you have spent years running from. It’s just totally ludicrous. Maybe someone could argue she did it to ‘slay some demons’ but there is no way that you would write a game that was for other people’s entertainment in those circumstances. It just would not happen!

I won’t explain how the book ends because even after this you might still want to read it. The ending is an even more unlikely and incredible set of circumstances than the bit I have already described and for it to have happened in that way is just beyond all credibility.

You can also add to that some really clichéd dialogue, lots of jokes about how “this would never happen on NYPD Blue” and so on. You had to totally suspend common sense for this book to work for you but if you look on Amazon loads of people rave about this book, so maybe I am totally wrong. Having said all of that I wouldn’t say never to read this book. It was engaging in its own way, even if to find out how such a preposterous story would turn out. (Sorry if you really love this book by the way…)

I had a look on the www to see what people though and was really amused by a site that rates various aspects of the book, including a book’s more risqué content. It assessed it as follows:

Sex: Yes
What kind of sex: - descript of kissing

What?? The book has sex in it because it describes two people kissing? I obviously really did not pay attention in biology lessons at school. No wonder teenage pregnancy is so rife in the UK.