1 out of 4 stars
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Orion has just been released from prison. It's time to rebuild his life, so he starts the Black Gangsta Organization. They deal in illegal weapons, drugs and prostitutes. He can't really forget his time in prison, though, especially after being brutally assaulted by three inmates. He's determined that he's going to get revenge.
In the meantime, his bookkeeper decides to skim a little bit off the top of the Mexican Mob. Sadly, the Mexican Mob doesn't look too kindly on this and takes revenge on him and the Black Gangsta Organization. Thus ensues a gang war to end all gang wars.
The Criminals by Bruce Wilson is about 550 pages worth of violence, sexually explicit scenes, name calling and torture. The book is classified as Crime/Mystery/Thriller/Horror. I don't usually do this, but in this instance I'd like to get the rating out of the way early on. I rate The Criminals 1 out of 4 stars.
Having said that, I'll start with the positive. The writing style wasn't bad. There were no plot holes and one scene flowed smoothly into another. Unfortunately, that's all I could come up with.
The negatives far outweighed the nice writing style. The first thing that bothered me was the author's constant use of derogatory terms. The word "*****" is thrown around as if it was as common as the word "the." While this may be the way that gangs talk, I found it offensive. I think that the author could have easily substituted other words that would be just as authentic but be less controversial.
Next, there was only one woman in the book that wasn't looked at as a sex object. That person was one of the gang member's mothers. In a similar manner, there were enough erotic scenes that the book could have been reclassified as erotic fiction.
Continuing forward, the book was filled with explicit drug use. This included step by step instructions on how to shoot heroin. This was highly unnecessary and extremely off-putting.
What's more, there were elements in the book that I thought were extremely unrealistic. For example, the gang members were constantly having juice (cranberry juice, orange juice and apple juice) in champagne glasses. Really? Secondly, one gang member involved his whole family in counseling sessions. Hmm. Maybe I'm stereotyping them, but I just can't see gangsters doing those things.
I also found more than enough grammatical errors to show that this book was not professionally edited. Mostly these errors consisted of missing or substituted words. While not overly distracting, it was enough to make me take off on the score.
It's for these many reasons that I couldn't rate the book any higher than 1 out of 4 stars. I do believe that the author is capable of writing an extraordinary book, but I didn't feel that this was it. In its current state, I can't recommend this book to any audience.
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The Criminals
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