Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Intoxication / Tim Kizer


Reviewed by: BigAl

Genre: Psychological Thriller

Approximate word count: 10-11,000 words. Bonus story: 4-5,000 words

Availability    
Kindle  US: YES  UK: YES  Nook: NO  Smashwords: NO  Paper: NO
Click on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords store

Author:

“Tim Kizer is an author of several novels and numerous short stories in the suspense/horror and action thriller genres. He loves to travel and lived several years abroad.”

For more, visit the author’s website.

Description:

“Leslie has a suspicion: someone at work is trying to poison her. Can she prove it? No, and she doesn't care that she can't as she takes the law into her hands.”

Includes a bonus short story, Hitchhiker, the first story in the author’s As the Darkness Falls series, which is described as follows:

“When a serial killer hitches a ride one sunny day in a beautiful California valley, he does not suspect that he may have met his match, who is dead set to take another life. The battle of wits begins and only the most devious mind will survive.”

Appraisal:

The version of this ebook I received had two stories. Intoxication, at just over ten thousand words, is long enough to qualify as a novella, and Hitchhiker, a bonus short story of not quite five thousand words. In both cases, the basic story was creative. I especially liked the twist ending of Hitchhiker, which was very clever.

The problem I found is both stories needed a lot more polish to rise to their potential. Part of this is inadequate copy editing and proofing. These stories passed my threshold for the acceptable number of such issues for a novel, in spite of being around a quarter the size of a short novel. Additionally, there were many sentences that read awkwardly and the author fell into the clichéd problem of telling instead of showing. The worst offense in this regard was a clunky narrative in Intoxication explaining what one of the characters had done the night before that didn’t fit with the flow of the story and was clumsy to read, despite describing a critical plot twist.

FYI:

Some adult language.

Format/Typo Issues:

A large number of copy editing and proofing misses which include missing words, extra words, and wrong words.

Rating: ** Two stars

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