Layers of Deceit

Lies Have Consequences

By: Robert Stephen

Narrated by: Dan Orders

How far would you go to get back someone you love?

Five years have passed since Jonathan Dunsmore's last and only best seller. Forgotten, he's lost everything including beautiful Nisha, the only woman he loved.

Dangling on the brink of insanity, a stranger appears in the author’s life: a person who knows Jonathan will do anything to get Nisha back. "Do you want to write another best seller," says Beckett Reed. "To write about a killer you must become a killer."

Torn between his fear of Beckett Reed and his desire to hold Nisha again in his arms, Jonathan must become a character in his next book. Jonathan randomly stalks and kills a man and makes it look like a robbery-homicide. However, hidden in the dead man’s wallet is a piece of paper, which his brother, the leader of a Russian gang, will do anything and kill anyone to get it back.

©2018 Robert Stephen (P)2018 Robert Stephen

Cheesy and cliche, with lots of errors to boot

First of all, a disclaimer: "This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this voluntary review."

This is a tough one to review. I listened to the audiobook version of this book, and I just found it to be really lacking. The plot had a few moments of 'okayness', but I mostly found it to be full of gaping holes, needless side-plots, and cliche. It read like what might result if someone fed every police drama and Russian Mafia movie ever made into a computer and then made it write a screenplay of its own. The ending left a lot to be desired. I don't want to go into details and spoil anything, but the chaos of the final chapter just left me rolling my eyes.

In my opinion, there were also far too many grammatical errors and instances of sloppy writing for a published work. The tense was constantly shifting in the middle of scenes, things were described in a hyperbolic way that didn't even make sense, and twice the names of characters were even changed and then changed back in the middle of a scene. Just very sloppy.

The narrator was not bad. But I wouldn't say he was good either. Some of my worst pet peeves were evident, such as adding a 't' at the end of 'across', making it 'acrosst', and rushing through pauses that were very necessary to make sense of the dialogue. And the sound effects he made were just bad. I also didn't care for the use of electronic effects to make it sound like telephone conversations were happening through a telephone receiver. I do give him credit for trying to do different voices for all the major characters, but again, it all felt very cliche.

So there you go. If you're looking for good writing or a stellar vocal performance, keep looking. But if you want a little entertainment, even just at the faux pas in evidence, this might be the book for you. In my opinion though, not worth the time I spent listening to it.

Definitely not worth the time spent

This book was just amateurish. I could not finish it because i assume all the grammatical errors and other mistakes would just pursist. This book had some ideas but definitely needed more time in the cooker.