There are two kinds of deaths that scare me; trapped in a sinking ship with the water rising and capital punishment. Both of these scenarios send shivers down my spine. It must be the wait that terrifies me; the certainty that you are going to die and those critical moments when death is upon you.
In No Rest For The Dead the story opens with the convict waiting in her cell for the warden, chaplain and guards to come and get her. Then entering the death chamber and seeing the gurney with all the medical equipment waiting to perform a lethal injection. Gha! Oh my god! Instant lump in my throat and elevated heart rate!
The scene was so well written that I had to stop reading for a while just to recover from it. Oh, and did I tell you? The execution does not go well. Shit.
No Rest for the Dead is an interesting project; each chapter was written by a different author, each one of them best-selling.
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The story truly begins long before the events that open the book. We follow "Christoper Thomas", curator of a prestigious San Francisco art museum, as he steals valuable art and uses a female staffer for his own gains.
He's arrogant and despicable and I was very happy with the knowledge that he would soon be dead. But the book was taking too long to get to the end of his story and into the meat of novel that I found myself putting it down for days.
It's well written and I have no complaints about that but all if these events were explained on the dust jacket so I find myself wondering when these guys are going to stop with the exposition and get on with the story of righting a wrong.
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The discovery of the body - oh boy - wonderfully disgusting and scary.
A perfect set up for the Kathy Reichs chapter
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Page 118, that's as far as I could get. Although there were parts of the book that I really liked for the most part I just could not bring myself to care enough to continue reading. Try as I might I found myself putting the book down for days at a time.
A big part for my decision to abandon the book was the never-ending exposition (which was explained on the dust jacket) and the never-starting investigation Jon Nunn was supposed to embark on.
And, maybe, that's the real problem; the dust jacket - it gave away half the book in three paragraphs making the reading a chore - I kept wanting to get to something new and then I realized that something new is a different novel.
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