Title: Slumming among the Blockbusters
Product review: This book has been billed as a literary thriller, but--and this is sad, as Ms. Hospital is a writer with considerable gifts--it works only fitfully as a thriller and never even a hint of a whiff of a little as a literary novel. It's turgid and stagy; the main characters are badly underdeveloped; and the climactic scene in the terrorist bunker is as staggeringly pretentious a bit of hooey as I've ever read. That said, the book has some lovely lines, some persuasive details, and enough narrative momentum that I did slog through to the end. Due Preparations reads like the work of someone a little too desperate to write a blockbuster . . . and at the same time Ms. Hospital asserts her literary ambitions and respectability by strewing the text with clumsy allusions to Defoe and Camus and and Boccaccio.
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