Book 653: Off the Grid – Robert McCaw

I requested a copy of this from the publicist, when they reached out to me about my next read, Mike Papantonio’s Law and Addiction.* Unfortunately, I probably should’ve just stuck with the latter. This book has a lot going for it, the protagonist sounds interesting (a veteran, a cop, a dark secret), the location is exotic (Hawaii), and international intrigue, but nope nothing pays out.

I’m honestly not sure whether I should be more mad at the author or the editor. I’m not sure there was an editor, based on some of the super repetition (that had nothing to do with the story or dropping clues) and the super formal/stilted way the characters spoke to each other. Seriously, it was painful at some points. I did look into Oceanview Publishing and it says it’s an independent publisher, but based on this book I had to wonder if it was more vanity than independent, which doesn’t reflect well on them.

The biggest problem, by far, I had with this book was the stilted dialogue. Like I get it, maybe McCaw was going for effect or something, but it was just painful and the further I got into the story the worse it got. There was also the weird decision to translate EVERY SINGLE Hawaiian word into English except randomly on two occasions. It would’ve been better to just let the reader learn from context rather than add more words to the already overly wordy passages.

Eventually, Koa noticed a heavyset, red-haired man on a soapbox. The man’s crudely hand lettered “Kill the Sovereignty Movement” placard caught Koa’s eye. The word “KILL” was ten times larger than the other words. A crowd of a couple dozen around the speaker was mostly hoales. Several were shabbily dressed and unshaven, and Koa guessed most came from poorer communities. The speaker, also a hoale…” (136)

Like why, of all terms, wouldn’t you define this one? I mean I got that it was white people/foreigners, but as I re-read this passage I was like oh no maybe it means indigents. Either way, that additional mention at the start of the next paragraph was a rough addition.

Some of it was word choice, as in the second passage below, but a lot of it was just pedantic or over descriptive or even just weird point of view shifts,

“Koa returned to the house. Two doors opened off the great room. He opened the first door and stepped into a small bedroom. Piles of drawings and fabrics three and four feet tall covered the small bed. A closet without doors bulged with more stuff. The place, he thought, must be inhabited by hoarders. Nothing adorned the walls, except a large, and now terribly familiar, Nāinoa Nihoa political poster.” (36)

“She led him to a large shaded lānai and offered him a seat on a mat. While Koa, unused to sitting on the floor, lowered himself awkwardly, Ryan Change disappeared into the house. While she was gone, Koa thought about taking notes, but as usual, rejected the notion. Note taking discouraged stray comments and slips of the tongue that gave revealing nuance to testimony. Besides, Koa had a near-photographic memory. If he made notes at all, he did so only after interviews or for personal data like names, addresses, and telephone numbers. People expected you to write those things down.” (43, bold emphasis mine)

And maybe most egregiously annoying was the way the protagonist went around doing his job. Instead of reading about Kosovo on the internet like any sane person would do, he called in a favor with a university professor. Wait, what? Yeah. He didn’t do leg work and figure out everything he could and then call in someone to connect the dots or find the missing puzzle piece, he straight up had a professor come in and he asked him “Where is Kosovo?” Like WTF? With how much else McCaw included in dialogue and description you think he would’ve loved writing a long ass internet search about various tangential subjects, but instead he used it as an opportunity to either show Kane’s connections to other people or bring back a character from the first novel? Either way I got so mad at the book I almost stopped reading.

There were other issues with the book, but the above ones were the biggest. I didn’t even touch on the cookie cutter exotic females, they were either smokin’ hot Hawaiian’s like Kane’s girfriend or smokin’ hot Asians like the other women mentioned in the book. It was honestly kind of gross that they were described that way and/or when McCaw tried to give them depth it just felt like lip service more than actual depth. Or the lack of using the location as a character other than “oh no hot lava burned a body almost beyond recognition” and “natives are afraid of historical sites, we’ll hide the treasure there.” I mean it’s Hawaii, come on!

Recommendation: Pass. The writing was stilted and repetitive making it very difficult to read. I also found most of the characters to be one-dimensional (if even that, look at the female characters—ugh). I got it in my head I should read the first book in the series and it ended up working out in my favor that the local library didn’t have it. If they did I probably would not have made it to this one. And also, the big reveal of the whodunit? Yawn…it really should’ve had more impact or there should’ve been more red herrings or something, this is a thriller/suspense/mystery after all.

*I received a copy of Off the Grid in return for my honest opinion. No money or goods were exchanged.

Opening Line: “The plume of smoky steam rising like a sulfur cloud from a volcanic vent told Hilo Chief Detective Koa Kāne he’d been called to a nasty scene.”

Closing Line: “Yea. Governments do things like that.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)