Official Review: The Placer by John Greenwood

H0LD0Nthere · Post by **H0LD0Nthere** » 11 Jun 2014, 21:36

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "The Placer" by John Greenwood.]

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A placer is a person sent secretly into a dangerous situation to defuse it. Their pay is low. Their organization is a small one, run by one man. Each placer has been trained in psychology, martial arts, marksmanship, and so on.

That is the premise of this book. It’s a good premise for an action novel, in that it resembles many, many TV shows, notably Person of Interest. In this book, we follow placer Martin Howell on his assignment as he is sent to Florida to prevent a shooting spree in a middle school. He is to go undercover as a substitute history teacher at the school where the shooting may take place, and find the shooters before they carry out their plans.

Clearly, there is potential here for a lot of tension and poignancy. Think of the social dramas, the personal tragedies, in the lives of the students; of the politics played out in the teacher’s lounge and school district. Not to mention, this is Florida. There could be gators, hurricanes, fraught political elections. The possibilities are endless.

Sadly, most of this potential remains untapped in The Placer. There are quite a few colorful minor characters, including a teacher’s-lounge nemesis, but they play almost no role in the plot. There are plenty of fight scenes, but even those fall far short of the tension they could achieve. (This is because of the way they are written – more about this below.) But the biggest disappointment to me was that Martin Howell does not get to know his students. We are given no fascinating, heart-wrenching glimpses into the love affairs and breakups, the social climbing and pretensions, the identity crises, the difficult home lives, the fads, the bullying perhaps, that could be going on in a middle school. There are so many lost opportunities that it’s hard to put into words.

Nor is there any sense of clues building up. We are not particularly led to suspect one person, then another. (Although I did try.) Although Martin Howell does do a certain amount of research, the impression I received was that he wasn’t trying very hard at this job. While the days tick down to a school shooting, we watch Martin get up in the morning, fire up his beloved Keurig coffee maker, go for a run on the beach, lie out on the beach with his books to prepare for class the next day, eat endless hamburgers and drink endless Coronas. I am not kidding. What could have been unbelievably complex, tense, and tragic, ends up as … a fairly boring book.

There is one exception to this boredom. Interspersed throughout the book are little glimpses into the mind of the (anonymous) boy planning the killing. These are designed to scare us with how close the date is approaching, and they do a good job. Every time I read one, I wanted to yell, “Get the lead out, Martin!” These glimpses can also be poignant. In one such soliloquy, the would-be killer imagines how popular (!) he’ll be after the deed is done. He will be famous, and he will be a true warrior. He dreams of joining the military some day. I found this passage really tragic, as I always do when reading about doomed dreams before the character realizes they’re doomed. And also, of course, because of the timeliness of the school-shooting topic.

Finally, we come to the writing style. The book is narrated by Martin Howell, so it’s him I’ll pick on here. Ah, yes, Martin – God love him. Martin is in far better physical shape than I’ll ever be in and has a more glamorous job than I’ll ever have … but sadly for us, Martin Howell is no writer. There are constant typos, grammatical errors, and so on. A good editor could fix that. But this may surprise you or then again maybe it won’t, Martin writes in long loose run-on sentences like this one but with fewer commas, some of them you just can’t believe, I don’t know what it is maybe he just needs another Corona. His narrative reads like an Internet rant without the discourtesy, cussing or passion. We are treated to a stream-of-consciousness-style view of his thoughts, and here I am writing like him again, luckily he isn’t a pervert, but he is a bit of a glutton like me so his thoughts often stray to the Keurig and to burgers and Coronas, sometimes at quite inappropriate moments. His writing style really sucks the drama out of what could otherwise be some intense conversations. Nothing like having a bit of dialogue sandwiched between layers of “I wish I’d had three cups of coffee” and “I ate my sandwich, it wasn’t bad” and “Maybe I should consider a career change.”

I strongly considered giving this book one star out of four, but in the end, I can’t do that. Despite all the missed opportunities, despite reading like a first draft, it does have an internally consistent plot. Things do happen in this book. Furthermore, I think the premise is a good one. It could be turned into a terrific series, if each book was given a lot more attention than this one was in terms of researching the local culture where the placer lands, and developing the book’s possibilities. I hereby award The Placer two out of four stars.

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ALRyder · Post by **ALRyder** » 14 Jun 2014, 18:36

I get so frustrated when I find a book I feel has wasted potential, but I understand your need to rate it 2 stars instead of 1. Great, informative review. Yours usually are.