Kill the reviewers

Warning: Spoilers for David Baldacci’s The Camel Club ahead.

I’ve never read The Camel Club, and I doubt I will. But I was checking it out on Amazon, and found yet another example of the absolutely worst kind of book review. I am astounded that the guy who wrote this is employed as a reviewer by a major company (in this case Publishers Weekly).

Here’s what he wrote:

One night, while meeting on Roosevelt Island in the middle of the Potomac River, club members witness the murder of Secret Service employee Patrick Johnson, thus thrusting the wacky crew into the middle of a bigger conspiracy than they could ever have imagined.

There are scores of characters and subplots to keep track of while the story veers back and forth between venues and villains, forcing readers to remain alert yet patient while awaiting the high-concept payoff. When it finally appears, it’s a doozy: kidnappers who harm no one and are reasonable people with a legitimate gripe bring the U.S. to the verge of nuking Damascus.

Why oh why does he have to give so much of the plot away? Why not let us be surprised when the agent is killed? And worse, how much does it take away to know ahead of time what the “doozy” of a payoff is?

Good reviews give you the tone of the story and an overview of the situation without giving away any of the plot points. I like to be surprised, and if the author had wanted us to know half the book going in he would have put it all in the first few pages. (”My name is John Smith. This is the story of how I discovered that my father was a spy and my mother turned out to be an enemy agent…”)

It’s the sign of a weak reviewer and a poor writer if the only way you know how to describe a book is by recounting the plot — whether in a review, a back-cover blurb, or in a movie trailer. And clearly Publishers Weekly has some weak reviewers.