(Note that I only read to page 62. I stopped because life is too short to read books that annoy me. If someone believes these problems stop later in the book, then by all means correct me.)This is the second political/military thriller I've read, written by a long-running best-selling author, that breaks basic rules of good writing. I guess when you can sell books on your name alone, you don't have to write well anymore.In this one, there were two main flaws that bugged me so much I stopped reading. The first was that there were too many characters to keep track of and I didn't really care about any of them. This happens in series sometimes, when all the backstory and character development was done in the first novel, but it's still sloppy. And the characters need some hooks to help tell one apart from another. I couldn't even tell the British agents from the American ones because they spoke the same.The second problem was excessive dialogue spoken solely for the sake of the reader. When real people talk, they don't say things like, "Do you remember when..." or "As you know..." followed by a detailed explanation of information that both characters are already familiar with. Real people don't talk about things they already know, they just reference them: "That was like your birthday last year." "Oh yeah, that was awesome."When I see mistakes like this, by an author with 60 titles under their belt, it makes me feel like they've gotten lazy or sold out. It works for them and the publisher, I guess, but not for me.
