Still Looking for Mr. Right

The Righteous Men

Sam Bourne

Penguin

A few weeks ago, my best friend and I decided to catch the latest Jet Li movie and grab a burger at our favourite diner in the west end. As usual, we didn't plan it very well and had time to kill between the end of our meal and the start of the show. Instead of going to the movieplex to play air hockey and spend pots of money on overpriced video games, we ended up at the bookstore.

For Peter, I think it was a fairly worthwhile trip. He managed to spend a half an hour in front of the Ian Rankin section and eventually came away from the shop with a couple of good reads. Unfortunately, the literary gods were not as kind to me and stuck me with what I can only describe as a complete dud.

I struggled to get through this novel. The writing was bad, the story was implausible, and with the number of redundant technology explanations included within the text, I can only conclude that the author assumed his audience would be made up of either Luddites or octogenarians (okay, okay ... and maybe also my dad.) While I will admit to liking crazy Messianic cult stories as much as the next person, they have to be, at a minimum, interesting cult stories. The Righteous Men wasn't remotely engaging and it has the dubious distinction of being the first work reviewed on this blog that I'm going to tell you not to read. Zero mitzvahs out of five.