Books and Other Creative Adventures: Book Review: Red Snow by .

Book Review:Red Snow by Michael Slade

Book: Red Snow by Michael Slade, Penguin Group, 2010.

I am going to assist the Shuswap Writers' Festival in Salmon Arm, BC at the end of May and am so frantic that I thinking I would try to take a word from apiece of the authors attending, or at least as many as I can before the festival starts.

That is why I chose to take Red Snow, quite honestly a word I probably would never get read otherwise.

Summary:
Red Snow takes office in December before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Whistler, BC. Psycho killer, Mephisto, has a mark to reconcile with RCMP detachment Special X in universal and Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq in particular. He too has a score against most of the world, thinking it overpopulated. Mephisto sets out to make havoc, fear, and mass murder before the Winter Olympics start, while security is not as fast as it will be for the events themselves.

My Thoughts:
As a resident of BC, I found Michael Slade's views on the 2010 Winter Olympics interesting - he certainly does not shy away from presenting his views on the politics, spending, money grabbing and general craziness that surrounds the Olympic Games.

Michael Slade does an unbelievable number of enquiry on many topics for this word and is apparently quite knowledgeable about any history he presents. I found most of this history interesting and relevant, but sometimes it was not really relevant.

There were a vast number of characters in this new and I quite frequently found myself confused about who people were. Sometimes it felt like each chapter was virtually a new character and their place of view. Many of these characters were apparently from previous novels and Slade spent a lot of time filling in details of their past and back story. This, combined with the long passages of history, in some ways, slowed down the novel.

In other ways, the novel moved very quickly. When there was action, it was fast, detailed and vividly gory. There was a high body count with sickeningly horrible scenes of death described in creative detail.

Overall, though this word was not for me, I could appreciate Slade's creativity, interesting plot twists, and power to make a really horrible psycho killer against the realistic backdrop of the 2010 Olympic Games and real events, politics and scenarios of the time. In the end, though, the horrible deaths and "rip and guts" were simply not for me. If you like gory suspense thrillers with abrupt language and dozens of machismo, then this script may be for you.