2 out of 4 stars
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Darkness In Malaga by Paul Bradley is the first volume of his Andalusian Mystery Series geared for adults. As the title suggests, this story reveals many of the dark atrocities going on in Malaga, Spain. It follows three main characters who are all trying to locate a young woman who has been kidnapped.
The novel begins with each chapter revolving around separate characters. This made me wonder if the whole book would be written in a way that tells the story piece by piece with a main topic but without a main character. However, each of the people I read about were given quite a lot of backstory and enough details for the reader to invoke emotional interest in them. By the fifth chapter there is a repeated character and much later on, the three main characters meet each other for the first time and collaborate to solve the case.
The author has a great vocabulary and writes with plenty of visual details to give the reader a clear view of each scene. Most character reactions seem believable and intense scenes are given the right amount of attention. Often times, I found some descriptions were over done but usually I enjoyed reading those extra bits of history or geography anyways. Unfortunately, though much of the backstory and history is incredibly interesting to me personally, it doesn’t always serve a purpose or add to the story. Some of it became almost tedious to get through and I often found myself resisting the urge to skim through those parts. It also frequently disrupted the story’s flow. For example, at one point Inspector Prado is thinking about a missing person case when the author suddenly side tracks to Prado’s backstory of never having bothered with cars and how “as long as they had air conditioning, he was happy”. It feels random and gives nothing to the story or that character. I’d rather have kept reading about his thoughts on the missing person case than get side tracked like that.
Though the author’s vocabulary is great and his sentence structure is usually grammatically correct, for some reason there were many instances of question marks where they did not belong. This occurred on nearly every page, often multiple times in the same paragraph. The story needs professional editing to smooth over those odd errors, but the writing overall is still rather good.
There is one point where a character knocked at someone’s door and they did not answer but the door was unlocked. “He pushed the door wide open, gasped, and put his hands to his mouth.” The chapter ends this way and the next begins in someone else’s point of view. I like how the author utilizes the multiple main character writing style to his advantage here by allowing for suspense.
This book is very interesting. It has suspense, intensity, mystery, and the story is told in pieces from three main character’s points of view until they meet up about halfway through. The story also offers many different moments for the reader to stop and contemplate what happened to the kidnapped woman and develop theories. Furthermore, I was glad that minor details from the beginning of the story end up playing a much more significant role by the end. That experience always makes what originally felt trivial rather rewarding instead. However, due to a lack of thorough editing (mainly the numerous times where a question mark was added where it should not have been) and some awkward pacing, I cannot offer this story a 4 out of 4 rating. I also do not think it can be given 3 out of 4 stars because of how difficult it is to follow at times. I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars in the hopes that it goes through professional editing and can be re-rated in the future.
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Darkness in Malaga
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