Muse

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Ending!
Review: 'The Muse' introduces us to Johanna Brady, struggling actress, living in NYC. Johanna's life is not going the way she wants it to. Beaten out of a part by her best friend, Johanna is hitting rock bottom. Enter Matt Lang, author. Johanna meets him in a bookstore of all places, and proceeds to get involved in a very intense relationship. She agrees to go to Maine with him for the winter while he writes his latest novel, but soon all is not what it appears to be. The late night phone calls start and Johanna does not count on Matt being totally absorbed into his novel and his writing quirks. Half way thru, you do figure out who the killer is, but keep reading because even though you know who is doing the killing, you will not believe this ending. It is truly creepy, and it blew me away. Then you need to read this book all over again, to see if you pick up on the parts you may have missed to piece everything together again. Very intense ending!

**Pandora

Rating:
Summary: Don't give up
Review: After reading everyone else's reviews, I feel I must throw in my two cents worth.

I have rated this book 5 stars after a great deal of consideration. I believe it deserves the 5 stars.

I almost threw this book away before I was halfway through. It was dragging; I kept wondering when the story was going to get going toward the back cover description. But I kept plodding along.

This was a mistake. The reader must pay careful attention, especially considering the POV; first person. This is very important to keep in mind.

I made this mistake because I classified this book before I even started it. I enjoy crime thrillers, but most of them are quite predictable.

I classified this book as a crime thriller; but the first half of the book does not read at all like a crime thriller. You do need to read it carefully. There are clues, very hidden ones, the main one being the POV.

The ending is outstanding.

There are, however, some imperfections. The character, Harry Krinkle, took the name from the film 'Taxi Driver', according to Mr. Cecilione. However, Travis Bickle told the Secret Service agent that his name was Henry Krinkle. This was only mildly annoying.

There are some unrealistic parts, but all in all, it's a good read.

Rating:
Summary: a mixed bag
Review: Cecilione should be given credit for at least trying something different, even if he doesn't quite pull it off. A young actress finds that a mysterious visitor appears in her apartment late at night, then, after a chance meeting at a bookstore, goes off to an isolated home in the country to live with a best-selling author, who keeps her prisoner and may or may not have some dark secrets he doesn't want revealed. Along the way, the actress has to deal with a Planter's bag of assorted nuts, any one of whom may or may not be her mysterious visitor. The plot takes its time to get where it's going, and the actress is oddly passive and accepting about these things most of the time. I had made a mental list of things I found wrong with the book, but the ending answered just about all of them. The author pulls off a nice trick ending-- just barely. I think if he had re-worked this novel a little more, he could have had a dynamite thriller.

Rating:
Summary: a mixed bag
Review: Cecilione should be given credit for at least trying something different, even if he doesn't quite pull it off. A young actress finds that a mysterious visitor appears in her apartment late at night, then, after a chance meeting at a bookstore, goes off to an isolated home in the country to live with a best-selling author, who keeps her prisoner and may or may not have some dark secrets he doesn't want revealed. Along the way, the actress has to deal with a Planter's bag of assorted nuts, any one of whom may or may not be her mysterious visitor. The plot takes its time to get where it's going, and the actress is oddly passive and accepting about these things most of the time. I had made a mental list of things I found wrong with the book, but the ending answered just about all of them. The author pulls off a nice trick ending-- just barely. I think if he had re-worked this novel a little more, he could have had a dynamite thriller.

Rating:
Summary: Good Stuff!!
Review: I couldn't read this book fast enough. It kept my attention the whole way through and yes -- just as the other readers have said -- the ending is intense. Though fiction, it is a believable story and quite the page turner. Michael Cecilione's style of writing is very straight forward and easy to follow PLUS he's got the "suspense thing" down perfect. I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent suspense
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book up to the ending! I notice that the other readers found the ending to be quite satisfying, but I felt it stretched credulity. Saying that, however, the rest of the book was suspenseful and kept my interest. The writing is fast-paced and the majority of the story realistic and entertaining. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good mystery that defies expectations.

Rating:
Summary: "Muse" Lacks Credibility
Review: In Michael Cecilione's "Muse", we meet Johanna: a 28 year-old struggling actress trying to hit it big in New York. Sound familiar? It should, since every character, every line of dialong, and every plot device is a tired rehash of similarly-themed books and films. Johanna meets Matt Lang, a hunky fortysomething author of mystery novels, and they immediately fall in love. He whisks her away to his cabin in Maine where she can be his "muse", inspiring him as he writes his newest tome.

Ah... but all it not as it seems. There are late-night phone calls. Dark secrets. Mysterious visitors. Matt starts to go crazy. In the last fifty pages alone, there are several cheap plot devices as the book culminates in a finale that will leave readers shaking their heads... and not in a good way.

There are certain characters in this novel--and readers will recognize them immediately--which are such cardboard-cutout charicatures that you half-expect them to only be pretending. But they're not. Also, this book has the kind of stilted dialog where a character addresses the person they're speaking to in every line with their first name. Who does that?

In all, this is a difficult book to recommend. It is forgotten the moment it is finished (in fact, I finished it only two hours ago and still had to go to the book jacket to remember the name of the protagonist--surely not a good sign).

Rating:
Summary: The Epitome of Predictability and Implausibility
Review: It defies logic as to how this book ever got published. Unlikeable characters, holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through, and beyond irritating dialogue. The best that can be said about MUSE is that somehow, I read it to the end, so I guess you can say it's a pageturner. But after I was finished, I wished I had those hours back so I could go get a root canal instead.

Rating:
Summary: Muse
Review: Michael Cecilione, Muse (Pinnacle, 1999)

Among the number of ways in which this book goes wrong is one (and, in fact, it is the main one) for which Cecilione can't in any way be faulted, and that is that the book jacket contains the spoiler that gives away the ending. The person who wrote the back jacket copy for the paperback edition of this novel should be boiled in lead. If you already know what's going to happen in the last twenty pages, especially while the various reviews of the novel talk about how great the last twenty pages are, it takes away something from the book. A very big something, in fact. I'll try to avoid committing the same sin here.

The story opens with Johanna Brady, a struggling New York actress, meeting Matt Lang, fantastically successful crime novelist. The two have a whirlwind romance, and Matt ends up asking Johanna to spend the winter with him at his secluded house in the woods while he cranks out his next novel. This will set off alarm bells in the head of any dedicated mystery reader, but the dedicated mystery reader who's ever had a whirlwind romance is likely to do the same quick ratinoalization Johanna does. Once they get to the cabin, things start getting interesting. (Complications... oh, you know the drill.)

It's also where the book falls apart. Johanna and Matt, along with various minor characters (the best of whom, a Robert DeNiro wannabe who actually drives a taxi for a living!, never gets anywhere near the due he deserves-- I'd love to see Cecilione write a followup to this concentrating on that guy), are well on their way to being complex and believable characters until this point. Once they're out in the woods, Johanna's actions become preditable, and she starts sounding the same note over and over again; Matt's responses to her actions do the same. While all this is going on, the two also fall into the genre-writing trap of sudden mood swings that make no sense; they go from flinging things across the room in one paragraph to clutching each other and ripping bodices in the next. A little of that can be good fun; too much and the reader will start wondering if Cecilione has been channeling the spirirt of the late Dame Barbara Cartland.

Still, if you have the willpower to not read the back cover, the final twenty pages are arguably worth the three hundred eighty that precede them; Cecilione sets the scene so that any number of endings are plausible, and then roots between them to find the perfect combination of the plausible to create an ending the reader won't be likely to have come up with. The payoff would have been even better had the setup been in the same league, but it may be enough to lure the hardcore mystery reader who has nothing on the shelves to read. **

Rating:
Summary: A wickedly ingenious thriller. A literary Mobius Strip
Review: Mobius Strip - a continuous one-sided surface that can be formed from a rectangular strip by rotating one end 180° and attaching it to the other end.

MUSE by Michael Cecilione is breathtakingly clever. Unfortunately, it's also difficult to coherently review because its impact is almost all in the ending, the last 20 pages. Not wanting to run afoul of Amazon's book review gendarme by submitting a "plot spoiler", I can only say that the conclusion's plot twist immediately brought to mind a Mobius Strip. (A geometrician - is that a real word? - might criticize me for the analogy, but that's what comes to mind. Hey, I was only a life science major, OK?)

Johanna is a terminally struggling wannabe actress living in New York. On a visit to the local book barn, she meets author Matt, who gives her an autographed copy of his latest psychological thriller. This leads to a couple of hot dates, after which Matt invites Johanna to his isolated Maine chalet to be his guest while he writes his next book. So far as described, this is the meat of most of MUSE, except for the mysterious stranger, dressed all in black, who is able to enter at will Johanna's locked NY apartment in the middle of the night just to watch her. Who is that masked man, anyway?

Faint clues to the direction of the storyline can be discerned in the following four excerpts:

On the plot of the initial book given to her by Matt, as described by Johanna: "But the book had everything: love, violence, sex, a resolute heroine, a twisted male lead, and a surprise ending."

On the book's heroine, again as observed by Johanna: "It was so realistic, though. I felt like I was the heroine."

Later, at the chalet, Matt ponders the ending of his potboiler-in-progress: ""Endings are funny things. I never plan them... more often than not, they come as a complete surprise..."

And finally, regarding the title of his latest book, Matt says: "I've given the title a lot of consideration. Come, let's drink to MUSE."

The four snippets quoted in no way reveal the "gotcha" conclusion. It'll knock your socks off. I'll most certainly buy Cecilione's next release.