Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Landon Beach, The Sail ***

The Sail is the epitome of a three-star genre book: a moderately engaging story comprised of reasonably well executed thriller clichés.

Robin Morris and his teenage son plan to circumnavigate Lake Superior in a thirty-six-foot sailboat, diving to famous shipwrecks along the way. They stumble upon sunken treasure and run afoul of the criminals who have been searching for it for decades. 

Were I Mr Beach's editor, I would recommend slimming down the setup. The sailing trip doesn't launch until page 100, they discover the jewels on page 173, and the bad guys show up on page 185 (of 223). The thriller portion consists of a single action sequence that occupies about as many pages as Robin's journal entries explaining life lessons to his son. The author wants to make us care about his characters and provide a sense of realism, but he uses too much mundane detail to do so.

I would also recommend a more straightforward villain. All the story requires is a ruthless thief or drug dealer, but we get a full-on Bond villain with a secret lair who kidnaps women and drugs them into being his mistresses. For the sake of the story I'm willing to suspend my disbelief about Robin's remarkable combat skills, but the hidden cave door and forced sexual initiations are too ridiculous.

Spoiler alert! Despite the setup I described above, the bad guys actually attack Robin and his son to recapture one of the kidnapped women. The jewels are a MacGuffin and turn out to be located within swimming distance of the villain's lair. 

I'll stop here before I talk myself into lowering its rating.

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