Hand of Fate
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Product Description
When the host of a well loved radio talk show is murdered, the suspects alsmost outnumber his millions of listeners.
Candid radio talk show host Jim Fate dies tragically when poisonous gas fills the studio while his polarizing show, “The Hand of Fate,” is on air.
In the ensuing panic, police evacuate downtown Portland–and the triple threat of FBI Special Agent Nicole Hedges, crime reporter Cassidy Shaw and Federal Prosecutor Allison Pierce start piecing together the madness, motive, and the mystery of what just happened. And this time it’s personal since one of the women was secretly dating the host and has access to his home…as well as possible evidence.
In the days following Fate’s murder, these three colleagues and friends must confront a treachery within the team while finding the not-so-public life of Jim Fate. Together, they must uncover the stunning truth of who killed him, how close the killer really is, and the twisted motive for this cold-blooded murder.
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Jim Fate, talk show host extraordinaire, and a Bill O’Reilly doppelganger, opens a package in his studio and dies from a poison gas that may or may not be sarin. Panic ensues in downtown Portland as people rush out of the building where the studio is located. The opening scenes are promising but things go downhill from there as the Triple Threat Club, FBI Special Agent Nicole Hedges, crime reporter Cassidy Shaw and Federal Prosecutor Allison Pierce, attempt to bring Jim’s killer to justice.
There is no shortage of suspects as Jim is pretty much despised by all. Along the way the leader (s)? throw in some ‘meaningful’ women’s issues like rape, miscarriage and prescription drug abuse with which the Triple Threat gals seem to be afflicted. The last quarter of the novel turns really ridiculous (but no spoilers here in case you choose to read this dreadful book).
The characters are one dimensional, the writing simplistic, but I suppose as beach or airplane reading it will suffice just as well as reading the latest airline mail order catalogue. Of course I have only myself to blame. Wiehl’s last novel ‘Face of Treachery’ was equally dreadful. But I had hoped that a second novel rooted in the radio talk show world of which Wiehl has first hand knowledge would be better. No such luck. Lis you’d better hire yourself a new ghost writer!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Had I known the manner in which talk radio loudmouth Jim Fate shrugged his mortal coil, I never would have opened the package which contained this intelligence. Mail can be fatal.
In addition to her regular appearances as a officially authorized analyst on the honest and balanced channel, Lis Wiehl, J.D., Harvard Law School graduate, and ex- federal prosecutor, co-hosted the Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly for seven years. Since to be scolded and lampooned for her “dopey” interjections and mocked for her unfamiliarity with some of Mr. O’Reilly’s favorite Motown artists–each instance of such grievous ignorance promptly accompanied by a derisive “Lis Wiehl, Harvard graduate, ladies and gentlemen!”–appeared to be Ms. Wiehl’s primary function on this program, persons unconcerned with the ratings business and the attendant need to manipulate audience demographics may marvel why the motor-mandibled Irish man employed the services of a co-host at all. (Among many additional things, Ms. Wiehl touches on the who and why of co-hosting in the book we are about to chat about.)
In one particularly memorable Radio Factor episode three years ago, an irate Bill O’Reilly ordered Lis Wiehl’s microphone cut and thundered that she was “not allowed to speak for three minutes” because she had allegedly “misled” his audience. In reality, Ms. Wiehl hadn’t misled anyone, but Mr. O’Reilly had misheard a word. Had she really said open as a replacement for of oath in the context at hand, the mike-cutting would have been justified. (Although he was dead incorrect, Mr. O’Reilly was being exceptionally kind–for “open,” I would have sent her home for the day.)
During the commercial break following this incident, the wrongfully silenced Ms. Wiehl noticed a large padded envelope with a red string tab among the stack of her aggressor’s unopened snailmail on the U-shaped studio table, and she started to what-if-isize: what if there were a bomb in that package? … no, not a bomb … death would follow much too quickly … how about a small smoke-grenade that would spray a cloud of sarin gas into his face the moment he pulled the tab?
Lis Wiehl felt an eerie sense of contentment, indeed elation, at the thought of the ill-mannered Talkmaster gasping and coughing awhile before crumpling the floor, his lifeless eyeballs staring up at the soft, fuzzy blue ceiling … what say you now, Bill O’Reilly? where be your gibes? your rants? your diatribes? your flashes of mockery that were wont to set the table on a roar? Reasonably chapfallen? (Ms. Wiehl, being of Danish extraction, shares a certain kinship with Prince Hamlet.)
My account of Ms. Wiehl’s train of thought in the immediate wake of the injustice she had suffered at the jaws of a tyrant is pure speculation, but may I present as circumstantial evidence her second thriller, Hand of Fate, which coincidentally kicks off with an attractive female co-host who, during a commercial break, hands her domineering boss a “padded envelope from a publisher” that “was in my box this morning, but it’s really yours” and quickly exits the studio to “get some tea.”
You guessed it–this would be the last piece of mail that talk radio firebrand Jim Fate would ever open.
In the novel, the murder victim is described by various characters–among additional glowing encomia–as a “blowhard” and a “loudmouthed jerk” who
* permanently had an opinion
* liked to rile everybody up
* [was] all about getting in a name’s face
* just lapped up attention and did anything he could to get it
* wasn’t above shading the truth and even ignoring facts that didn’t fit his theories
* probably every day [...] made somebody mad enough to at least reflect about killing him
In the back of the book are printed endorsement letters from three different “key radio personalities,” each of whom deems himself the inspiration for Jim Fate. Although the character could conceivably be a composite of several individuals with a few imaginary attributes thrown into the mix–Jim Fate is described as a 41-year-ancient bachelor who works for KNWS radio in Portland, OR, and doesn’t have a cable show–, agreed the longstanding Wiehl-O’Reilly tie in conjunction with the aforementioned 2007 mike-cutting incident being referenced in the narrative as one of the potential nails in the victim’s casket, his real-life identity is honestly open-and-shut, as the man himself duly acknowledges.
So there you go. Bill O’Reilly says it’s absolutely him, and anything Bill O’Reilly says is excellent enough for me. (I don’t use emoticons in my articles, but if I were to make an exception, I might add a winking smiley face right here.)
On page 2, Jim Fate addresses his co-host by her last name (“With all due respect, Hanawa, …”), a classic O’Reilly habit, just in case there ever was any doubt as to Jim O’Fate’s real-life identity.
Before long thereafter, on the bottom of page 4, the doomed bloviator pulls the red string tab on the fatal package, and for the next five pages he slowly asphyxiates–a process the leader chronicles with manifest relish in gruesome detail–until he finally flatlines on page 9.
The remaining 280-plus pages are devoted to the “Triple Threat Club”–an estrogen troika composed of Federal prosecutor Allison Pierce, FBI special agent Nicole Hedges, and TV crime reporter Cassidy Shaw–pounding the Portland pavement and beavering away, pardon the pun, at narrowing the sizeable pool of suspects while dealing with plot-unrelated personal issues.
Although at long last in a dramatic denouement the perpetrator blows his or her (or their?) take in, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter who shot J.R.–or who gassed Jim Fate–because for every person who loved him, there were probably ten others who loathed him, so nearly everyone had a motive, plus the tale lacks a hidden-in-unadorned-view trail of clues which, in hindsight, compels the outcome.
Compared to additional contemporary novels I’ve read of late, this one has a bit of a made-for-Network quality to it in that it contains (a) no sex beyond a few G-rated references to it (“He had already offered her a job and a place back in his bed”) and one account of a past rape where the victim had been conveniently drugged and hence couldn’t provide graphic details even if she wanted to; and (b) no profanity whatsoever save one mention of the word pee in the context of taking a pregnancy test, and two or three instances of whore–statistically language, one three-letter word plus one five-letter word makes two four-letter words on 293 pages, assuming we stretch the definition of profanity to include these terms. (Incidentally, Bill O’Reilly once or twice referred to Ms. Wiehl as Small Bo Peep on the air.)
So we’ve got blood and hair on the wall (“Half his head is gone”), but no venturing beyond first base and no terrible language in a tale set in the rough-and-tumble world of high-octane media, crime, and law enforcement, and which stars a Carrie-&-Co-style coterie of youngish professional females–albeit a trio and not a quartet–frequently engaged in girlie talk amongst themselves, permanently topped off with the “most decadent desert on the menu.” Not that these missing fundamentals are essential for the composition of gripping fiction, nor would I automatically notice their absence, but something here smacks of omission aforethought.
In scanning Amazon reviews for Ms. Wiehl’s previous novel, Face of Treachery, the first in her Triple Threat series featuring the same three female protagonists, I came across statements like this one from Lisa R.:
“Some Christian readers may find some of the scenes to be a bit edgier than they’re used to. There is no graphic detail, but there is an `after the fact’ bedroom scene between an unmarried couple and also some scenes with one or more of the protagonists drinking.”
Edgier than they’re used to? What do Christian readers usually read? Toaster manuals? I take place to be a Christian and a reader, but “Christian reader” sounds like a separate species, i.e., the total being something additional than the sum of its parts.
So after rumor has it that having taken a intermission from her Small Bo persona and transformed into the Marquis de Sade for her a-bit-too-edgy-for-comfort fiction debut, Christian readers will be reasonably relieved to learn that Ms. Wiehl washed out her licentious mind with Ivory for the sequel–no more after-the-fact anything, neither unmarried nor otherwise, although, alas, some protagonistic wine-sipping is still going on.
(Should the de-edging trend continue, the third Wiehl, Heart of Ice, due in spring 2011, may well be about three pretty angels drinking tea while drifting on a floe–no snuggling up to each additional to stay warm, of course; better to let the poor girls freeze to death than to risk edgy lesbian overtones.)
“From humble beginnings in a village in Scotland 200 years ago to our modern-day publishing enterprise employing over 600 people, Thomas Nelson’s goal has been to Honor God and Serve People. At Thomas Nelson, we judge that we exist to inspire the world. We judge that the world desperately needs inspiration–the right kind of inspiration–and that we are a conduit for change [...] We want our products to be a means by which God breathes new life into His world.”
These statements on the publisher’s website–Thomas Nelson Inc., the largest Christian publishing company in the world–hint at the solution to the mystery (additional than the mystery of who offed Jim Fate). Nothing incorrect, of course, with God breathing life into His world and Ours. Inspiration is excellent, and Hand of Fate certainly inspired me to peruse its publisher’s mission statement a bit more closely:
* First, we want our products–books, videos, and conferences–to affect people. We are not in the business of merely entertaining our audiences or “tickling their ears.” [...] we want our products to provide practical guidance.
* Second, we want our products to have a positive emotional impact. [...]
* Third, we want our products to be a source of real change, both in individuals and in our larger culture, [and to] provide an opportunity to affect deep and lasting change.
Aside from its rather thinly veiled objective–emphasis on thinly veiled, not the commendable objective itself–to rise above mere ear-tickling and to have a positive emotional impact upon its readership in accordance with Thomas Nelson Inc.’s specifications, Hand of Fate delivers a excellent deal of inside baseball to make it an entertainingly instructive read that never gets dull. As a officially authorized practiced and media insider, Lis Wiehl knows her streets, and it shows. The reader learns the meaning of expressions like womb to tomb and postmortem lividity and receives small crash courses in talk radio production, grand jury trials, and forensics.
And are you aware that most color laser printers do more than just print party invites and color-coded bar charts, but that they also secretly encode the printer’s serial number and manufacturing code on every document they produce? Something about tiny yellow dots that appear about every inch on the page, nestled within the printed words. I had no thought. Now I know, and should I ever commit a felony which necessitates the production of color prints, I’ll make sure to take extra precautions lest the evidence be traced to a Kinko’s two blocks from my house–although this may not be exactly the kind of practical guidance the publisher had envisioned.
While I would stop fleeting of characterizing Hand of Fate as preachy, here and there it inclines in that direction–in my humble opinion, to filch a stock locution from a name we know. Language of whom, Ms. Wiehl’s long-term “sidekick” also wrote a novel in which an aggrieved party settles the score using unlawful methods, i.e., embarks on a veritable whacking bender. Although clearly the more conservative (“traditional”) of the two thrillerwrights, Bill O’Reilly’s 1998 revengefest Persons Who Trespass–a quick-paced behind-the-scenes primer on the inner workings of the American news media laden with juicy details about the business in which the leader cast himself as the killer and the cop–incorporates not only a more unbleeped kind of dialogue, but also passages like this infamous one, which I’m sure Mr. O’Reilly regrets having included, for it keeps getting quoted ad nauseam at the expense of everything else in the book:
“He gently teased her by licking the areas around her most sensitive erogenous zone. Then he slipped her panties down her legs and, within seconds, his tongue was inside her, moving rapidly [...] Shannon lifted Ashley off of him and quickly knelt behind her [...] His hands firmly gripped her buttocks. Ashley could feel his rhythm. First quick, then slow, then quick again. He brought her right up to orgasm, then pulled back.”
Strictly language, there’s no `after the fact’ bedroom scene between an unmarried couple in Persons Who Trespass, either, as the frolic ends when after more than an hour of lovemaking the couple fell asleep. Hence no edgy after-the-fact stuff to upset the Christian readers. (The same goes for the living room scene and the shower sequence.)
Obviously, Mr. O’Reilly had a different publisher. (Broadway Books)
In the back of Lis Wiehl’s Hand of Fate there is a “Reading Group Guide,” a list of thought-provoking questions on a variety of subjects broached in the book, such as whether our society has become too reliant on drugs to combat common problems like insomnia and anxiety, whether the country has become too politically polarized, and whether words can sound harsher when delivered electronically.
I would add this set of questions to the Guide:
How visible is the Hand of Nelson in Hand of Fate? Why did the leader choose a publisher who insists on the inclusion of inspirational fundamentals–and likely on the omission of others–in the final product, thus inevitably imposing constraints upon its writers? Had Ms. Wiehl published her novel with Bancroft Press or Broadway Books as a replacement for of Thomas Nelson, would it have a less Lifetime-TV feel to it and perhaps feature a dash of salacity in place of a Reading Group Guide?
Not that is should. Just curious if it would.
Prior to turning novelist, Lis Wiehl keyboarded two non-fiction works:
“Winning Every Time: How to Use the Skills of a Lawyer in the Trials of Your Life”–a title which raises the paradox of who would win if both parties to a dispute have read the book–, and “The 51% Minority: How Women Still Are Not Equal and What You Can Do About It.” (I don’t know…buy more shoes perhaps?)
Both were published by Ballantine Books–like Broadway Books an imprint of Random House. So what made Lis Wiehl switch to an overtly Christian publishing concern for her fiction series?
And why do these inspirational aspects “bother” me so much that I’ve launched into a whole Talking Points memo on them? Am I so flaming a liberal that any reference to the Deity spooks me as much as poor small Damien panics at the sound of church bells? Or am I just intimidated by strong female characters and debates on women’s issues like some men who wax hysterical at the sight of a bloody Tampax?
Well, my shrink will have to figure it out. On a conscious level, I simply marvel if the life lessons open in Hand of Fate could have been open in less conspicuous a fashion such that I, your humble reader, wouldn’t have become curious enough to really research the publisher to figure out what’s going on here. Because somehow these lessons, valid as they doubtless are, don’t flow organically from the narrative but rather seem added to it like sails on a sauceboat–what would Chekov say?
“One must not place a loaded rummage though on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” (Anton Chekov)
The First Law of Narrative (“Chekov’s gun”) states that if there’s a gun on the mantelpiece in the first act, it must have gone off by the third. In additional words, ideally, every element introduced into a tale should either (a) bear on the course of events directly or (b) reveal something about a person’s character which shapes his or her behavior which, in turn, shapes the tale line. Fundamentals which do neither just sort of “hang there,” all dressed up with nowhere to go, as it were.
For instance, one of the protagonists, Cassidy, is hooked on sleeping pills. You could argue that this goes to her character, for certain personality types more than others are liable to substance abuse. Honest enough, but then again, as far as the tale line is concerned, as a replacement for of as a Somulex addict, Cassidy might as well be described as a contortionist, a cat lover, or a bookplate collector, for her addiction neither helps nor hinders nor in any way bears on the search for Jim Fate’s killer. Sure, she falls asleep in her bathtub one night and nearly drowns, upon awakening vows never again to do anything so stupid, then drives to work. It’s not like she suddenly conks out during a stakeout and as a result a suspect slips through the cracks, thus adding a new twist to the tale. That Somulex bottle is like a gun she keeps carrying in her purse but which never goes off. Sure, the murder victim had introduced her to the pills, so there’s a tie, but a tie that doesn’t impact on the tale is like a cog that doesn’t turn anything.
Her addiction, it would appear, serves as a rather flimsily disguised justification to plug Narcotics Anonymous–certainly a worthy enterprise–which, as per its literature, urges its members to make a choice to turn their will and their lives over to the care of God and humbly question Him to remove their shortcomings. Therefore, the addiction pattern and its resolution align splendidly with the publisher’s mission statement while having nothing to do with the tale itself.
The additional two ladies also struggle with personal issues that do not turn anything in the novel’s center of gravity, namely the murder of Jim Fate. Thus Allison, the Federal prosecutor, is pregnant. While nothing speaks against being with child while hunting down a murderer, the ex- does not bear on the latter unless the pregnancy were somehow related to the motive for the crime, or perhaps during an ultrasound exam the rapid lub-dub of the fetus’s heartbeat reminded Allison of a galloping horse, a sound she had faintly perceived in the background on, say, a recording of one of the killer’s phone messages lacking having been able to place it at the time, but now this newly learned equine tie leads to the perpetrator who owns a horse-racing track.
Since nothing like that happens in the book, Allison seems pregnant for no reason additional than to showcase the vicissitudes of the condition, such as craving red meat one day and being repulsed by it the next, and to have life deal her a rough hand in the course of her gestation which provides an opportunity for personal growth and hence to serve as an inspiration for the reader in accordance with the publisher’s objective. As far as the tale goes, but, in lieu of being pregnant, she might as well be playing the trumpet.
So Cassidy is addicted to pills, Allison is happily hitched and expecting, and Nicole is a single mom who has lost her faith in God. In a parallel universe, our three heroines collaborate on solving a murder. Does Moses ever show up to part the waters and forge a passage between the two? At one point, a character from the past suddenly stops by for a very dramatic sequence in the course of which bullets are fired and in whose wake Nicole starts to warm up to the Lord again–any relation to the murder of Jim Fate? A pinch of illegal immigration gets also tossed into the stew, with both sides of the issue being open, honest and balanced, and Jesus having the final word on the theme–is there an undocumented alien component to the murder?
In the end, Hand of Fate reads like two separate books under a single take in, one being a murder mystery, the additional a tract on Faith and muliebrity, all to some extent incompletely amalgamated like chocolate cake served with a side of broccoli.
To some extent counter-intuitively, chocolate and broccoli are perfectly compatible: Gary Null’s Nutritious Chocolate, for instance, contains Green Algae Powder, Wheat lawn Powder, Green Barley Powder, Alfalfa Leaf, Oat lawn, Broccoli, Sage, Kale, Aloe Vera, Watermelons, Pink Grapefruits, and a slew of additional ingredients not commonly establish in dark chocolate, yet it tastes tasty and painstakingly amalgamated–so it can be done.
To be or not to be honest, Shakespeare sometimes paid no heed to Chekov’s gun either–perchance he knew not of’t–, and like Hand of Fate, the aforequoted-from Hamlet, too, has a bit of a ragbag quality to it. The play includes copious fundamentals and speeches which are only loosely, if at all, related to the fratricide at its core. For example, Polonius loads a mountain of sage advice upon his son Laertes prior to the latter’s departure to France:
“Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means brassy.
[...]”
And on and on. Yet it is unclear what, if anything, Polonius’s spectacle of wisdom reveals about his character–additional than standard issue complexity–such that it renders the ancient man particularly susceptible to eavesdropping behind a curtain and getting impaled in the process.
Creative literary analysts, of course, will permanently come up with a cogent-sounding interpretation for anything. If a water-skiing stasher–a mythical creature briefly mentioned in Hand of Fate–suddenly appeared during Hamlet’s gravediggers scene and for no perceptible reason launched into a protracted soliloquy on where to find the best filberts in Copenhagen, scholars would be falling over each additional in extolling the allegorical importance of its speech with respect to Hamlet’s insanity, and Shakespeare would now be credited, rightly or wrongly, with the semantic broadening of the word nuts to include the meaning of crazy.
Besides, the Stratford-upon-Avoner had a certain way with words, and the stasher’s verses would be suffused with such riveting imagery that their essential purpose in the context of the tale were of lesser significance.
Motivational psychology teaches that a strong enough why can take care of nearly any how. Mark Twain once confirmed that the difference between the right word and the nearly right word was akin to the difference between a lightning bolt and a lightening bug. (In the spirit of its substance, I slightly reworded Mr. Twain’s quote.) Thus in writing–as in composition and chocolate-building–a strong enough how can take care of nearly any what.
If all the fundamentals in a tale hang together like beads on a string and each one of Chekov’s guns dutifully goes off before curtain time, unadorned who-what-when-where language, interspersed with a few zingy one-liners here and there, works swimmingly. If, on the additional hand, several tales that don’t reasonably gel on their own are to be bundled under one heading, stylish use of language goes a long way towards forging into a homogenous whole what may otherwise seem like a chimera of disparate fundamentals. In one scene, Hamlet’s mother, the queen, questions for more matter with less art, but were she agreed a just-the-facts-Jack prose version of Hamlet, Her Highness may quickly change her royal tune and demand the art be restored as a crucial catalyst for the matter.
Hand of Fate, while certainly eloquent, focuses on content, not language, i.e., on the what more than the how; and regarding the how, it opts for clarity over style. Presumably, neither Ms. Wiehl nor her co-leader/ghostwriter/distiller-in-chief (“She’ll say, `What’s a trap and trace in a officially authorized context?’ and she’ll distill it down”), mystery writer April Henry, spent hours poring over each paragraph recasting it over and over until it scanned like a symphony before tackling the next. As a result, rather than being enthralled by the flow and the rhythm of the language, the reader cannot but focus on what happens next and marvel why it happens. Lacking unique and catchy word choice as a common denominator to glue it all together, the inspirational aspects of the three protagonists’ personal journeys remain sorely untethered from the hunt for the killer, and never the twain shall meet.
In “The Da Vinci Code”, every few dozen pages, a name or something advances by snaking. In addition, characters seem inordinately prone to wheeling around (veer with a “hee,” not Wiehl).
Several instances of an uncommon word or expression–or a common term used in an uncommon way, such as snake as a verb–despite a plethora of alternate choices readily listed in the Thesaurus suggest an leader’s relative unconcern with language beyond its primary function, which is to convey meaning with clarity.
Say what you will about The Da Vinci Code’s literary merits or the soundness of its past infrastructure, every single element injected into the tale pertains to the search for the Holy Grail and, by extension, to the murder of the curator in the Louvre. Teabing’s butler isn’t allergic to peanuts merely because food allergies are a problem in society and the afflicted individual ultimately improves his life by joining Allergics Anonymous, thus serving as an inspiration to similarly situated readers, while the search for the Grail merrily proceeds on a different channel. Butler Rémy gets killed in the context of the very quest which forms the meat of the novel by being agreed cognac laced with peanut powder. Chekov’s gun–the peanut allergy–doesn’t just hang there all dressed up with nowhere to go like the pill addiction in Hand of Fate. It really goes off in the form of anaphylactic shock which bears on the tale line by eliminating an accessory. If it didn’t go off, the laws of literary compensation require it be handled with such spellbinding verbal panache that its discharge–while still desirable–would become secondary.
Incidentally, Hand of Fate, too, features a goober component, and happily–unlike the Somulex sideshow–it does bear on the murder of Jim Fate. The leader(s) didn’t throw in a few peanut crackers just because Thomas Nelson finds them inspirational. They’re really a crucial part of the tale.
History will tell how many timeless quotations Hand of Fate holds:
“I’m going to get some tea.” (Hand of Fate)
sounds just as memorable as
“Tomorrow is another day.” (Gone With the Wind)
The observation that
“It is usually more vital how a man meets his fate than what it is.” (Hand of Fate)
seems no less astute albeit no more universally acknowledged than
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a excellent chance, must be in want of a wife.” (Pride and Prejudice)
Yet despite containing a number of potentially classic lines like these, style and language were agreed fleeting shrift overall. Of course, Papa Bear (Papa Mouse?) O’Reilly permanently says that if you make a aver, you must give examples to back it up.
No problem.
So here’s an example:
“Allison straightened up and bit the edge of her thumbnail. ‘I’ve been thinking about it too, Cassidy. All the evidence we have is circumstantial. [...] despised Jim Fate, and he had access to [...]. But if hating Jim Fate was a crime…’
Cassidy finished the thought: ‘… then there are a lot of people out there who are guilty.’
This exchange between Allison and Cassidy occurs on page 268. By now, we’ve been informed about a batrillion times that Jim Fate is one of the most despised individuals that ever walked the solar system. Everybody knows. Even the water-skiing stasher knows. Therefore, as soon as Allison says, “But if hating Jim Fate was a crime…,” the alert reader automatically finishes the thought, just to find it finished once again by Cassidy in the following line. So not only does Cassidy’s line completion (a) provide no new information and (b) mildly insult the reader’s intelligence by completing a thought as if he or she would have been unable to do so, worst of all it also (c) is phrased as blandly as an unsalted rice cake tastes. A triple threat indeed.
In my humble estimation, Allison’s thought should have been (a) left uncompleted and not responded to, (b) left uncompleted and concluded by Cassidy with a simple “I know”, or (c) concluded in a snazzier manner, such as “… then half the country would be locked up.”
But “… then there are a lot of people out there who are guilty” nearly looks like a screw-up at the printing plant where the original half-sentence was accidentally erased, and some lithography apprentice quickly whipped something up as the presses were already rolling.
Anytime an element is inserted into a narrative–be that element a whole theme, such as pregnancy or addiction, or just one line–which brings no news to the party or brings news but doesn’t bear on the main tale line, what else but pure style could justify its inclusion? For if it also ain’t snazzy, witty, or poetic and euphonious by way of rhythm, sound, and flow–i.e., fun to read–it’ll just sit there on the page like a monkey on a rock (yes, the selfsame monkey David Letterman wouldn’t give your troubles to).
On the positive side of the language ledger, Hand of Fate is far less snake infested than The Da Vinci Code. A forensic pathologist and his assistant have air supply hoses snaking up their backs, but that’s it as far as ophiology. This makes perfect sense, as too much phallic symbolism would likely make ashamed the Christian readership. If Ms. Wiehl and Ms. Henry (the distiller) had included additional snakes or snaking, Thomas Nelson Inc. surely would have removed them lest a few poison gas grenades from disgruntled worshippers might arrive in their mail (just as in response to this statement, I might receive a live diamondback in a padded package from Thomas Nelson in hopes that getting bitten may affect deep and lasting change in me).
While snaking does not loom large in Hand of Fate, a few uncommon-word repetitions caught my eye, although all of these are mere duplications rather than multiple instances of the same expression. Granted, I seem to be the only person on the planet sensitive to such repetitions, for even though The Da Vinci Code sold over 80 million copies and has been panned and trashed on virtually every account under the sun, a cursory Google search of snaking and wheeling as relates to the unusual frequency of these verbs in the book yields no results, save for my own brief lamentation on the theme.
Whatever word neurosis I may be afflicted with, these word duplications jumped out at me from the pages like jacks-in-the-book, and, I maintain, their presence bespeaks a touch of carelessness in the language department which ultimately may be reliable for why the various ingredients in Hand of Fate fail to coalesce as well as they should.
Of course, repetition as a stylistic contrivance or to avoid confusion must be distinguished from repetition as a result of having misplaced one’s Thesaurus. The following examples strike me as the latter. We’ll let the audience choose:
“Reality was slogging forwards with a child like a deadweight on her hip.”
Reality slogs on for another seven pages and then…
“She was plodding along with her head down, her mind someplace else, the sleeping [child] a deadweight on her hip, when she heard a shout.”
The second time around, I would have made the kid a millstone around her waist.
“They were in a predictable office space, fuzzy, blue, head-high walls building a warren of cubes.”
Later in a different building:
“Most of the floor was a rabbit warren of cubicles separated from each additional by shoulder-high partitions.”
Perfect. Now we can take the rabbits from all the warrens in Hand of Fate and feed them to the snakes in The Da Vinci Code. (“Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The warrens’ tasty bunnies shall fully furnish into the world the Vinci serpents.”) At least the cubes have turned into cubicles, and the walls have become partitions and shrunk to shoulder-height, but shouldn’t the second office be a maze as a replacement for of yet another warren?
“She felt herself cool a fraction.”
I had never heard or read the term a fraction used in the sense of a bit. Now I encountered it twice in one book:
“Makayla lifted her head a fraction.”
There are heap ways to slightly lift one’s head. A tad. A trifle. An iota. A mite. A whit. A hair. Too many fractions, and I feel I’m in math class.
These minor quibbles notwithstanding, I liked the book.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Worst book I’ve ever tried to read. I just gave up after reading 1/3 of the book and still the leader just goes over and over the same ancient dull part of the tale and never seems to advance to anything meaningful. I’ve read 80 books on my Kindle and this is the first review I’ve done. Just thought I would try to help people avoid what for me has been a very unenjoyable reading experience.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Hand of Fate starts out with a bang and goes down from there. I read the first book in the series and really couldn’t get into the 3 main characters but hoped they improved in the second book-they don’t. What I glean from the book it is a manual of politics and social issues-from immigration to government involvement. Then date rape-well not exactly a date-one of the main characters who flirts with a couple guys and they do the date rape drug (which is tragic)-then domestic violence-another main character who’s boy friend is abusive and she goes on TV to talk about it and her reasoning so people would like her better-most didn’t! The same character is addicted to prescription drugs-another social issue. This character is shallow and full of herself and not terribly likable.
There is a line in the book where Nicole says white college students don’t have to work while in college alledging that African Americans all do?? There are many affluent African Americans and just as many white young people who had to work through college. I thought that a terribly rascist line.
Allison is probably the most normal of the 3 and yet wondered where her spouse fits into the scene-he is nearly non dimensional. He’s just there to take care of her and do for her-you never hear anything she does for him.
Another irritating thing was calling Nicole-Nic(made her more masculine). What was the thing with nick names? No huge issue but distracting!
Really the 3 main characters have so many issues and they are supposed to be excellent friends and yet they don’t seem to know each additional very well. Their issues for me really detract from the storyline. I reflect the mystery itself had a excellent storyline but was so in a state with politics and social issues I lost interest and didn’t care about the characters a lot. If I wanted to read about politics and issues around us I would have bought a non-fiction book. The TV and Internet is so full of that, I look for escape into reading a excellent mystery or thriller.
I know I’m in the minority here but really establish myself skimming to get through all the long interviews that seemed just filler. I really tried to get into it but couldn’t. There were just so many annoying things that they out weighed what I felt would be a excellent mystery. Many liked it so maybe it was just me. I really reflect it could have been a excellent book lacking so many politics and issues. I felt the whole book is to get across the leader’s views on politics and social issues.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This book was a very excellent thriller. The tale is not over plotted but still supplies surprises. Follow the three lead characters as they solve the murder of a controversial and bombastic talk show host. Each of the women face a personal crisis also. These are some well constructed characters. The tale is plotted well. I establish the devious inclusion of christian ideology as a response to heartbreak also well done. Ms Wiehl does not beat us over the head with it but rather has it as the natural occurence that happens with personal reflection. After the conclusion of the book, she includes letters from various talk show hosts who all have a similar complaint. They do not know why see did not disguise them better, so they would not be recognizable. Certainly a fun read, a excellent thriller.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5