Review of On the Trail of the Unseen

[Ashley Thompson 27]

[Following is a volunteer review of "On the Trail of the Unseen" by Lynne Armstrong-Jones.]

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1 out of 5 stars

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Lynne Armstrong-Jones’ On the Trail of the Unseen is, at first glance, an adventure story about a race to find a cure for the mysterious plague that is sweeping across the continent. With the stakes so high, our heroes must do any and everything they can to stop it.

Except that isn’t what happens at all.


This story moves along at such a plodding pace that it quickly became a bog that I had to slog through. If we took all the inner monologues and amount of time that the characters stared off into space and sighed there wouldn’t be a book left at all. That could be because the writing style is so mind-numbingly passive that I couldn’t tell the difference when something happened or didn’t, but the pace and style of the writing made it seem that nothing could happen even if it wanted to, and could have used a round or two of some heavy-handed editing.

The characters could have used some more fleshing-out as well. There seemed to be inconsistent descriptions of the main male character, Nico; he was at first described as the ultimate specimen of masculinity, then as a large and unwiedly mass of a man who might have trouble getting through a narrow doorway. The women were mostly described in a way that a female reader could insert herself in the characters places, only with different eye colors, but were mostly 2nd place and ultimately submissive to their menfolk, who were in and of themselves oblivious to almost everything but their own thoughts on any given subject.

I truly believe that this author could have made a decent story. But without the appropriate language and dialogue skills, this one died before it could even get going.There was also a lot of head-hopping that would happen randomly in the middle of the section, and as soon as you thought you were going to get somewhere with a character in a scene, the point of view would change and the scene that you were gearing up to watch unfold was taken care of in the background. It was infuriating, and thus I can only give this book a 1 out of 5 stars .

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On the Trail of the Unseen
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