Give Us This Day

I bought Tom Avitabile’s Give Us This Day in a grocery store. It should have been a bad sign. Sometimes “grocery store books” are good. This one was not. Even by cheap thriller standards. No, make that especially by cheap thriller standards. The action scenes have the exact same (flat) tone as the rest of the book, for starters.

Anyway, we get secret agent Brooke Burrell as she shoots…. terrorists. Yep, it’s a “shoot the terrorist” novel, and the execution is nowhere near good enough to make up for the bland premise. The writing is done in rambling, really blocky paragraphs and constant jumps in iffy formatting. No one is particularly interesting.

This is the kind of book the mainstream technothriller devolved into in the 2000s. It combines “technology” and viewpoint hopping with watered down action and no sense of a big picture. There are just so many better cheap thrillers out there.