Reviewing: "Don't Look Twice" by Andrew Gross

Lieutenant Ty Hauck returns in this sequel to “The Dark Tide” with a bang. It has been a year since those events and much has changed. Hauck has become something of a media darling. His relationship with Karen has become increasingly problematic far beyond the different worlds they inhabit. Then, there is his 13 year old daughter, Jessie who is moving into adolescence and Ty is experiencing the culture shock that hits all fathers. He has all that and a lot more on his mind on a routine Saturday morning when he stops to pick up a few things at the local Exxon station.

A routine morning until the gunman, seemingly targeting Ty Hauck at first, opens fire sending bullets into the Exxon station. In the aftermath, while Jessie and Ty survive, the man in line behind them was shot twice in the chest and killed. The dead man was a federal prosecutor by the name of David Sanger working out of Hartford, Connecticut. Ty and his team from the Violent Crimes Unit of the Greenwich Police will soon be working a wide ranging investigation that leads far from the initial shooting with the help and hindrance of the FBI.

Experience has shown that the more strident blurbs on a book or in the promotional copy, the weaker the book and that is certainly the case here. Following the same tired formula of the previous book with this character, this is another paint by the numbers thriller despite the promising beginning. It doesn’t take too long to meet the newest vulnerable widow who had no idea her husband had hundreds of thousands of dollars in a secret account. Ty Hauck is, of course, attracted to her and her family while the last widow he romanced seems to be moving on with her life. There are other comparisons but it becomes tedious to list all the way this book follows the same format of "The Dark Tide".


Formulaic with its clichéd and shallow characters, teasers at the end of each very short chapter, frantic pacing encouraging readers to ignore the shallowness of this extended short story, the resulting read shows virtually zero improvement over the previous book. Fans of the author’s work as co-author to James Patterson through a number of novels may appreciate this read. Those looking for something beyond clichéd, shallow characters and an actual story of any depth, will not.


Don’t Look Twice
Andrew Gross
William Morrow (Harper Collins Publishers)
http://www.harpercollins.com
March 2009
ISBN#
Hardback
384 Pages
$25.99


ARC received through the Amazon Vine Program in exchange for my objective review.

Kevin R. Tipple © 2009