Rating: Summary: Don't Waste Your Money on This One! Review: Save your time and money and pass this one by. The characters are one-dimensional, the plot implausible, the emotional tone of the "hero" that of an adolescent boy. The writing is so flat I couldn't even force myself to finish it. The tension and suspense of a good mystery are completely lacking. In all, I found the book thoroughly disappointing.
Rating: Summary: Reasonably Entertaining Review: Starts out slowly, with a lot of back-story, then picks up nicely. Fairly implausible characters and storyline, but, hey, it's pulp fiction. Throw in a little allegory with a lost whooping crane, dangle a few red herrings, mix in the usual sex and a bit of violence, and you have the recipe for a typical modern mystery novel. (Personally, I have to admit I enjoyed the protagonist's penchant for vice. Everytime he reached for another shot and a beer, I got kind of thirsty.)One could almost use this as a study aid in a class for aspiring pulp novelists. Most of the standard devices for leading the reader are employed, but not to the point where one isn't aware of the manipulation. That's what keeps this from being a top rank story, yet at the same time it provides a useful guide for how to proceed. What always gets me about mysteries is how the main trick is to engage the reader with all sorts of misleading information, while at the same time planting some small clues as to what the denoument will be. In this case we are diverted for several hundred pages with the question of "is she, or isn't she?" Our flawed hero, meanwhile, stumbles in all the wrong directions, and the two or three paragraphs that contain the essential tip-offs are quickly forgotten. The very highest order of suspense novels will manage to fool us this way without our being aware of it. That doesn't happen here, but it's still interesting to see how well we've identified the author's intentions, and why. Not a bad way to kill an afternoon at the beach.
Rating: Summary: Pretty Much A Waste Of Time Review: The value of this book is that the author can write like you dream about writing. But the story itself is improbable if not downright silly. I won't dignify it by a synopsis. The characters are also wanting. Very few novels succeed in having the hero/heroine witness a crime and then give it the old "I won't go to the police because...". It does not succeed here, either. It's very difficult to believe that the protagonist can be as stupid as he is in this story. Freedman ought to get someone to plot for him. Don't waste your time.
Rating: Summary: A book you can't put down Review: Thirty-four years old Fritz Tulley is a tenured professor at a prestigious Texas university. The teachers and students at the college consider the daredevil a bit of a golden boy not just because of his youthful academia success, but because he is a maverick risk taker. His future is rosy until he meets and falls in love with Marnie, whose husband uses his clout with the university to get Fritz fired. Fritz returns home to his family's isolated Maryland estate, but resides in a ramshackle cottage doing [...]himself into oblivion. His one passion is bird watching in the swamp adjacent to his shack. He's busy taking pictures of the birds when he sees a plane land nearby with three men exiting before one is shot. He later finds out the victim is a Russian stationed in Washington DC and the corner of the land where he was shot belongs to James Roach, an Undersecretary of State with a very shady reputation. Although Fritz does not report the shootings to the police he has done some investigating on his own, which places him and those he cares about in danger. Even though BIRDS EYE VIEW is a very serious thriller, J.F. Friedman has a breezy light-hearted style of writing. Thus, when something actual happens to one of the characters, the audience feels shock and disorientation. Although Fritz is no saint he is a decent person caught between a rock and a hard place. Even so, he is trying to do the right thing by bringing a criminal to justice. He is the kind of character that readers want in a series. Harriet Klausner
Rating: Summary: freedman blew it this time Review: This book is probably one of the worst i have ever read. I have all of Freedman's books in my collection and bought this one blindly. The plot is well thought out, though already used a lot, but fleshing it out was lost in the drinking, sex and foul language. I normally would put a book down and kiss of the author after a couple of chapters with the language alone but i plowed thru to the end thinking it had to get better but it didn't. I would not recommend this book to anyone. I especially did not like his mother (who did nothing wrong in the whole book) getting killed just to keep the story going. Bad Bad Bad book karen nelson
Rating: Summary: Enjoyable!! Review: This story was pretty good, but I don't think it was much of a thriller. The most interesting was Fritz and his love for the birds. And the most disappointing was the killing of his mother. Why? I didn't think that was necessary. Also, Fritz and Maureen fell in love too soon. Still I liked the story. I hope to read more about Fritz in future novels.
Rating: Summary: Just "So-So" Review: This was not very thrilling, in my opinion. I will not write a synopsis since that has been done several times already (and done well) on this site. Fritz Tullis stumbles onto a murder and continues stumbling through the rest of the book. I never really felt engaged by any of the characters as they were not very well fleshed out. I found parts of the story to be implausible, such as the fire and its aftermath. The scene on the boat seemed very forced, a clumsy plot device to tie into later actions by Tullis and others. The most intreesting parts of the book were the descriptions of the locale for this book...the Eastern shore of Maryland. I liked reading about the flora and fauna of this region, as well as the Tullis family's landowning history.
Rating: Summary: Read no further Review: Unless you need something to waste your time. If you went to great lengths to identify an individual at a murder scene, that has been captured in a photo, would you identify only one of the three? Implausible waste.
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