1 out of 4 stars
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Guardian of Deceit is a coming-of-age story centered around Darwin Hastings, a teenage orphan who has been relocated from his home in Pittsburgh to live with a wealthy cousin in New York. Upon arrival, his hopes of recreating a loving family environment are immediately shattered by a cold and lonely welcome into the mansion of Luther Pinnelli. A disinterested manager shows him to his new bedroom in the utility closet and informs him that his trust fund won’t be touched without Luther’s permission, setting the forbidding tone for the rest of his stay in the Pinnelli household. Swept up unwillingly into a world of dishonesty, abuse, loss, and heartbreak, Darwin faces a constant uphill battle to keep his own faith in love and his determination to work in healthcare.
As an outline, Guardian of Deceit sounds like a heartfelt story full of high-impact issues that range from love gone sour to outright murder. I entered into it thinking that the main conflict would be Darwin’s struggle to defrost the heart of his very own Daddy Warbucks, unraveling the complex and dark worlds of the New York elite as he went. What we get from this book, however, is a plot that was far too ambitious for its page limit. All of the juicy plot points are rushed, bone-dry, and the conflicts are often resolved just a dozen paragraphs or a couple of chapters after they have been introduced. Almost in the same breath, the author will announce matter-of-factly that the police suspect Luther of a serious crime and that “two days later ballistics showed Luther’s gun was not the killer weapon,” and he was released. Having spent a good deal of my life devouring murder mysteries, the crimes discussed in Guardian of Deceit were especially tasteless to me. Coles doesn’t seem to be familiar with police procedure and he turned exciting developments into a soulless back-and-forth of one retired cop interviewing forgettable characters whose trauma will never be discussed beyond a single interaction. The entire novel reads like a screenplay or textbook with how straightforward it is, except that it somehow manages to have even less descriptive detail. The experience left me feeling detached, as though someone was giving me a syllabus to describe their life, going point-by-point down the list of events.
Ignoring the pacing issue and the way Coles occasionally skips to different scenes in every other paragraph, I had high hopes for the characters. The first chapter was promising, revealing solid depth in Darwin’s polite meekness, his intelligence, and his dream to become a medical professional. If you squint, most of the characters still maintained an acceptable amount of personality traits throughout the book to make them distinguishable. However, Coles transforms Darwin into a self-insert rather quickly, turning him into a white knight who can do no wrong, essentially erasing the remnants of the flawed, unsure boy we saw at the beginning of the book. For instance, while Coles tells us why Darwin is respected, he rarely shows it, often having characters profess their affection for him without demonstrating to the readers how he earned it.
This would also explain why at least three grown women turn into spineless bowls of jelly around Darwin and repeatedly ask him variations on, “Do you think I’m pretty?” Without exception, every female character eventually dissolves into a weepy mess with excessive reassurance seeking issues. Darwin’s response to their inexplicable emotional outbursts, typically, is to say nothing and let them continue pouring their heart out or to sip his drink silently as a woman confesses how deeply she has always loved him. His character is entirely based on wish fulfillment....Laszlo admired the way all the women had taken to Darwin, without exception, each in their own way.
- William H. Coles, Guardian of Deceit, p.26
Characters such as Helen, a wealthy heiress with cutting pragmatism and a craving for status, would have been pretty high quality if the author had put more time into developing them. In spite of her constantly looking down on us poor public-school plebeians (a sentiment Darwin shares), the chapter devoted to her first relationship was actually touching. However, further insight to her character is usually cut off early by the pacing of the book, and her feelings on things such as the death of a friend are never elaborated on beyond the observation that she looked like she was having a rough time. This also doesn’t absolve the author of doing things like referring to a couple of muggers by what he sees as their most outstanding characteristics: “the Black” and “the Hispanic.” For a few pages, we have to sit through Darwin playing as the white knight to his love interest while the author calls the muggers by these names.
I’m astounded that an editor didn’t pick up on this and ask for it to be altered. There are several creative ways to either introduce characters by their names or identify them by traits other than their skin color, but Coles doesn’t seem to put effort into giving his book this kind of polish. It is entirely focused on how awe-inspiring Darwin is, whether that means making millions overnight from a Scrabble application he co-owns the idea for or rescuing girls from two armed robbers or handsy perverts in an art gallery.Darwin knocked the gun from the Black’s hand with a blow to the arm and kicked with all his might to the groin. The Black went down. Darwin crouched quickly to face the Hispanic, who was coming at him. Darwin parried the knife hand and delivered a blow to the throat. Darwin felt and heard a crack and the youth gasped, falling to his knees. The knife dropped and slid a few feet on the ground. Dominique moved quickly to pick it up, but the Hispanic reached out to take it back before she could retrieve it. Darwin picked up the Black’s gun.
The Black grunted at the Hispanic to run. Darwin moved to protect Dominique. The Hispanic came at him, the knife low and pointing up. The Black hit Darwin with the massive weight of his shoulder.
- William H. Coles, Guardian of Deceit, p.250
I rate this book 1 out of 4 stars. In the end, I believe Coles bit off more than he could chew with this particular endeavor. The plot points and characters had a massive amount of raw potential, but nothing about the book was truly executed well, including pacing, writing style, and the inability to show instead of tell. I understand that Coles is an award-winning author who does receive positive reviews on Guardian of Deceit, so it’s possible that you might love this book a lot more than I did. If you are the kind of person who values quickly moving through a large plot and don’t take issue with any of the other things I’ve mentioned, this could definitely be a novel for you. However, I would not recommend this to any of my friends, and it is not something I would consider reading again.
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Guardian of Deceit
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