A Death Displaced
Andrew Butcher
Overall
** Plot ** Interactions **1/2
Characters
*** World **** Originality **** Grammar *** Style ****
Nick Crystan is a man without much of a
purpose in life. He spends his time trying to find enlightenment in
various ways and ekes by with part time work in a new-age shop on
Lansin Island. “A Death Displaced” begins with Nick having a
startling and realistic vision of a woman falling to her death. A few
days later when Nick recognizes the early parts of his vision are
actually occurring, he acts fast to save the life of the woman,
Juliet.
Although Juliet doesn't stick around to
thank Nick, this experience seems to indicate that maybe life has a
purpose for Nick after all. He begins having prophetic visions that
he struggles to understand.
Juliet finds her life changed as well.
Since the accident, she feels oddly disconnected from the world and
is told by a seer that she should have died that day and now her
spirit resided in the spirit realm while her body is still alive.
Because of this, she can now see the spirits of the departed. She has
a visit from Nick's mother, who seemingly abandoned her family when
Nick was young. Samantha Crystan asks Juliet to find her son Nick and
tell him to go to Grendel Manor.
Juliet does as she is asked and she and
Nick are thrown together to try and solve the mystery of Samantha
Crystan's disappearance.
Pros
For the most part, despite several
errors that should have been picked up in the proofreading, the prose
in “A Death Displaced” is good and after the first few chapters
the characters are engaging and three dimensional. The mystery
surrounding Samantha's disappearance lead Juliet and Nick to discover
some interesting history of the island and introduces some intriguing
characters. Nick and Juliet have an instant attraction to each other
that has a promise of romance and a nice hook to provide urgency to
the plot.
Cons
“A Death Displaced” is Andrew
Butcher's first novel and suffers from some structural issues that I
am increasingly discovering are fairly typical of self-published
books. As I mentioned above, the characters and story are engaging,
but the pacing could use some tweaking and tightening.
In the first couple of chapters, Nick
was such a wet rag of a person, that I wondered if I really cared
what happened to him, but as the story unfolds, we discover more of
his past and his general attitude towards life gets explained.
Mr. Butcher make some odd choices in
the plot. For me, the climax of the book arrived too soon and without
sufficient tension to really be satisfying. After the climax, Juliet
and Nick find themselves at odds and the story follows them as they
try to figure out what happened and how to move on. Then, instead of
coming to a more satisfying conclusion, the story line switches to a
new character who, until now, has played a bit part in the story and
has little reader sympathy.
In general, it left me wondering why I
had read the last 20% of the book.
Summary
It's obvious that “A Death Displaced”
was intended as an introduction to future books in the series and if
you read it with that in mind, you might not find the structure as
off putting as I did. As I stated earlier, the writing itself is
strong, the setting is interesting and the premise is intriguing. It
shows that Mr. Butcher has the potential to create some excellent
works in the future. Having invested the time to read the first book,
I will be likely to pick up the second if the reviews look good.
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