In an attempt to overcome the trauma of witnessing a fatality, William Norwick has been self medicating with alcohol and stumbling around the cold, wet streets of Glasgow drifting from bar to bar. After another night of excess, Norwick finds himself arrested and incarcerated. While held in custody, he begins to realize that the events of his life are being manipulated by outside forces and that the very blood that courses through his veins is linked to a conspiracy that could have consequences for all of humanity.
WEST END WILLIAM is the second volume in Courtney Leigh Pahlke’s science fiction/mystery Life Force Preserve series. The first book, Anna and the Resurgent of the Precious Blood, introduced the idea of a global conspiracy centering on bloodlines with its genesis in ancient alien interactions with mankind. The roots of the series lie in a car accident the author was involved in which resulted in her having to spend almost two years in recovery. The accident revealed that Pahlke had a very rare blood type and on researching this she uncovered a convergence of conspiracy theories relating to aliens and blood groups. Pulling on these strands, Pahlke began to weave the Life Force Preserve universe.
Pahlke has stated that she wanted to make her writing as realistic as possible and much of WEST END WILLIAM, for all its science fiction overtones, is decidedly naturalistic. Her evocation of the Glasgow streets and the biting cold of the Scottish countryside is well drawn as is her restrained use of vernacular which helps define character and place without falling into cliché. And while there is certainly nothing wrong with Pahlke’s writing when taken sentence by sentence–indeed, on occasion, she has a knack for a winningly poetic metaphor–but the prose is painfully slow going for a thriller and the sci-fi elements are withheld for far too long. It takes until the halfway point for the actual essence of the conspiracy to be revealed. Prior to that there is a mildly diverting but sometimes overwritten saga of a man with a drink problem staggering from one situation to the next, his ultimate aims and intentions as elusive as the emergence of an engrossing, identifiable narrative. This structural problem with the narrative drive of the novel is exemplified by many seemingly interminable passages of quite mundane dialogue that over extend what should have been fairly minor, functional plot points and nullify the drama and ruin the pacing.
Patience is rewarded eventually as the final third of the novel picks up speed and builds to an exciting and satisfying conclusion. The fact that Pahlke writes action sequences with verve and style only compounds the frustrations felt in having had to wade through so many over-padded pages to get to them. As Pahlke’s series continues and the conspiracies are further explored and exposed it should be hoped that she has the confidence to give her prose a much tighter edit as underneath all the verbiage there is a writer with the talent to spin an entertaining mystery thriller.
WEST END WILLIAM is the second book in Courtney Leigh Pahlke’s conspiracy series Life Force Preserve and, while the pace is slow in parts, there is much to like about the novel and an exciting conclusion rewards those readers who stay the course.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader