Giacomo's blog

Started off fantastic!
I love to get lost in a book, whether it is a mystery, a thriller, SciFi, Fantasy, History, Biography…it doesn’t matter, as long as the writing is good, the mistakes kept to a minimum, and the characters engaging with a good and believable plot. Lockdown started off with all of these. I had no trouble getting into Ryan Lock, the main character, and the plot seemed to be moving along at a nice pace, with no big holes; in fact, I was so involved I read half the book the first night.

I wish I had stopped there. In the second half of the book the plot, for me, lost believability and I soon found myself skimming to see when it would get better. Many of the characters’ actions in the second half seemed to be “plot convenient” as opposed to how they would really act based on who they were.

I don’t like to describe plots or give spoilers, so I won’t go into details, but in the end, the plot didn’t work for me. I felt Sean Black has the makings of an excellent main character in Ryan Lock, and he is a very good writer with a lot of talent. I just don’t think he put it all together in this novel. I was impressed enough with his writing though, to pick up his second book and see what that one is like.

I was also surprised to find not only several errors in grammar and typos, but also a few miscues that a good copy editor should have caught. Considering Sean Black’s publisher is the same as Lee Child’s I expected better.

I have a rating system for my books based on dialogue, character development, plot, storytelling, and quality. I would have rated this more than a 3.5, so I rounded it up to 4 stars. Emotionally, I wanted to give this a 3-star rating, because I had such high expectations after the first half, but when I looked at my numbers it deserved a 4. Also I realize that not everyone is as critical of plot as I might be.