Mind Game

Mind Game by Iris Johansen           Audio Book:  13 hours, 59 mins.      Mass Market Paperback:  464 pages                

I expected better writing from a New York Times best selling author, but, this book was torture for me to push through.    All I kept thinking was, she must be getting paid by the word.   There is so much drawn out absurd dialogue that is so nonsensical it was one of the lamest books I have read.    Real people would not stand around arguing over b.s. when they are in dire straights.     When you are running for your life from a potential attack from a killer you are not going to waste precious minutes or in this case what felt like hours, talking about meaningless drivel when your life is on the line or the life of people close to you.   It was just rubbish.    The themes in this book intrigued me, Scotland, Telepathic Communication, the ability to control blood flow in others which bordered on some vampiric themes at times, creepy Highland mist so thick that even Flashlights and lanterns couldn’t penetrate,  hidden treasure, but the writing just didn’t cut it.   This book reminded me of a highschool creative writing class where the students are given a notebook and told to write in it every day all semester long anything you want and this student wrote a long story.   It feels disjointed in many places.   I checked to see if this was considered a juvenile book because it just didn’t sound like an adult had written it.   There are two sexual encounters depicted, again, in a disjointed way like someone younger was trying to describe a sexual scene but not with any genuine emotion.   Like that person you kissed when you were a teenager and they seemed to slobber all over you because they thought you would like “wet” kisses.  Yuck and that sums up this book for me, “Yuck.”    It had so many good things going for it,  there were so many directions this could have gone in and even if this story stayed on point instead of detracting from the interesting to the long dull bouts of boring dialogue that had nothing to do with what was going on it could have been a good story, it just wasn’t.    Very disappointing book. I would NOT recommend this one to anyone.