Book Review: Nick Petrie’s Burning Bright
Book Review Wednesday strikes again!
Whether I’m reading a romance, a suspense novel, a mystery or even non-fiction, I’m a sucker for good writing. Which is why this week’s book review is about Nick Petrie’s Burning Bright.
I plucked it from the library shelf primarily because I am fond of Blake’s poem, The Tyger, which should tell all of us authors something about the impact of title choice. I checked the book out and brought it home not because of the review quotes on the back cover but because of the endorsement from Lee Child on the front cover.
If you write a novel whose main character is like Petrie’s Peter Ash, you can’t do better than an endorsement from Lee Child.
And, true to that endorsement, Peter Ash has a lot in common with Jack Reacher. Both are former military and have super hero level physical and mental skills. Both men wander about the country avoiding permanent attachment to things and people. Although, in Ash’s case, this is an attribute he would like to change.
Which makes me curious to find out how Ash will grow emotionally in the next book and the one after that.
But the real reason I will read the previous novel in the series, The Drifter and wait impatiently for the third, is because of sentences like these:
“He had wide, knuckly hands and the thoughtful eyes of a werewolf a week before the change.”
And this:
“A beer truck came at them, eating the whole lane.”
And, oh my goodness, this one:
“A car drove by, the sound of its tires on the still-wet pavement like painter’s tape peeling off the roll.”
There is a sensory precision in these gifts of sentences. And Petrie tosses them into the mix of his story with the careless precision of a master chef. Taste it for yourself, and tell me what you think.
Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.
