Twisting Tales and Truth - Edward J. Boudreau Jr - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Edward J. Boudreau Jr

GENRE: Short story Collection, Mysteries.

RATING: 2.4 stars.

In a Nutshell: An interesting mix of short-length mysteries. Some good tales herein, but the writing was too basic and meandering for my taste.

This is a collection of thirteen short stories, all from varied mystery subgenres. There is no author’s note introducing the theme of the stories, but the Goodreads blurb and the title offer enough of a hint about the content. Every story is divided across multiple chapters and even includes an epilogue, though this is quite a short book at a little over 200 pages.

Every tale has a male character in the central role, with women playing mostly typical parts. The first six stories are standalone tales, delving into the psychology of human nature and how motivations affect behaviour. The remaining seven stories are linked investigative mysteries with one character in common: Tom Reynolds, a crime reporter for a Boston newspaper.

I liked the first set of six stories a lot more than the Tom Reynolds compilation. One reason for this is that I am not a cosy mystery fan, and the seven linked stories were more cosy in style. Moreover, the initial set offered better variety across characters and situations; the latter felt repetitive and was overloaded with characters.

The ‘truth’ in the title is used literally in the first set, where each of the six tales ends with a kind of truth. This isn’t necessarily a moral, more like an observation or sometimes, a piece of advice. Nothing really earth-shattering about these ‘truths’, so though it was a novel idea, it didn’t impress me much.

While the stories offered an interesting array of mysteries, the writing style let me down. The prose is overly simplistic, with no frills or flourishes. No vivid descriptions of places. No atmosphere. This was the minor problem. The major problem was the penning style, which felt quite amateurish. Characters are introduced by their backstory being written in a single para than by letting us learn details about them through the plot itself. Tenses go back and forth between past and present, sometimes within the same sentence. The narrative perspective goes hopping from character to character without any reason. One of the stories reveals a part of the mystery in the title itself! There’s a whole load of telling and meandering. Characters are referred to by first name as well as last name randomly, thereby needing you to remember the full name of all key characters. Thus, though the stories were fairly entertaining, reading them was a strenuous and confusing exercise.

If you are not the kind of reader to obsess over grammar and style, you won’t be bothered by the above. I don’t mind simple writing – some of the best stories in the world are written in the simplest of vocabulary. But there is a difference between simple and basic writing, and this book falls into the basic category. All the writing issues can be fixed by a round (or more) of stringent editing. Indie authors should realise that human editors exist for a reason.

(On an aside, this is the third indie book I have read in November itself that suffers from such major editing issues. It’s very disappointing because until October, I have had a fabulous run with indie offerings. November seems hell-bent on spoiling this streak. I hope this doesn’t continue.)

As always, I rated the stories individually. But the writing deflected me from immersing myself into the stories, and as such, none of them blew me away. The best two tales for me were ‘Pickles Can Kill You’ and ‘The Candidate’, with 3.5 stars each.

All in all, if you aren't the kind of reader who gets easily distracted by editing blunders, then these stories might work fine. Recommended only to those mystery-lovers. As the other reviews show, no one else had no problem with this debut work. I am the lone outlier so far, so feel free to ignore crabby old me and give this book a go.

2.4 stars, based on the average of my ratings for each story.

My thanks to Amazon Smart Publishing and NetGalley for the DRC of “Twisting Tales and Truth”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.