The Ambassador's Wife - Jake Needham

The Kindle is a device I am still trying to master.  I'm still not quite sure what it is 'for'. It hasn't replaced my music or audio CDs in the way that an iPod initially and smartphone more recently have.  It hasn't dampened my desire for the written word on paper or my love of browsing in real bookshops.  I do, however, quite like the idea of the thing and carry it around with me everywhere.

Then I had a thought, perhaps the 'big thing' was that the Kindle was going to introduce me to stuff that I wouldn't normally read.  With that in mind I headed to the 'bestsellers' section on the Amazon in search of something that was both free and aroused my interest.

I spotted this and was intrigued. A 'tec thriller about Singapore policeman Inspector Samuel Tay, it sounded promising and it was free, so met my criteria exactly.  While I was reading it, I has no idea whether Jake Needham was a paper-published writer or one of this new crop of authors who have circumvented the publishing business and gone straight onto the Kindle store.

What I got was a decently plotted, excellently paced story with some very, very clunky characters.  Our 'hero', the middle-aged, slightly tubby, overly cynical, heavy smoker is somehow irresistible to younger members of the opposite sex.  So far, so pulp novel and there are worse ones out there than this. Attempts to flesh out his character by listing the books he likes reading felt more like an attempt by the author to hoist a flag of literary pretension.  My feeling was he was trying to say 'yes, I know I'm knocking out this populist rubbish, but I read proper stuff too!'.

The ongoing riff about Marlboro Red got a little trying too, especially when the action suddenly jumped to Thailand.  The Singapore setting had seemed a little forced and the Thailand section came across much more smoothly, something that was explained when I looked up the author later.  There is often one thing in a book that grates with me and lives with me long after.  In this it was our 'hero' being relieved to find that the coffee shop/cafe that he was in at 10am or so sold cigarettes.  Two things - if he was such a nicotine addict, why on earth didn't he pick up a carton of 200 at the airport? And, even more importantly, the last time I went to Thailand the place was awash with 24-hour convenience stores, 7-11 and the like, getting a tobacco fix is not difficult in Asia!

I won't dwell on the plot too much, it was pretty generic 'thriller-by-numbers' stuff and yet I have read far, far worse examples of the genre.  One thing that I didn't get, and had hoped for from the blurb, was to learn much about Singapore.  As I mention, it seems that the author is much more familiar with Thailand and I think it would have been a bolder statement to set the whole book in Singapore.

It's difficult to criticise a book that was free and I have to admit that it fits that most heinous of literary descriptions, a 'page-turner'.  It's far from being a classic even in its own crowded genre, but it's also far from being a complete dud.

Would I read another Inspector Samuel Tay book? Possibly.  Would I buy a Samuel Tay book? Possibly not. This was, therefore, an interesting exercise in Kindle usage and book shopping thereon.

It turns out that Jake Needham is a 'real' author - more information here http://jakeneedham.com/books/ .

The nuts and bolts behind the writing should have taught me that, I might be tempted to try some of his other output although this didn't quite do it for me.