The Reaper by John Connolly

A slightly boring book with beautiful writing.

I bought this book 2 years ago without knowing anything about it. It was on sale for less than $2. When I finally opened the plastic cover, I realized that the book was from a detective series, The Reaper was the eighth book (if I am not mistaken, too lazy to check again). Fortunately, the book can be read without reading the previous series first (it wasn’t like Lord of the Rings)

Blurb:

As a small boy, Louis witnessed an unspeakable, racially motivated crime that changed his soul. As a teen, he sought brutal vengeance for his mother’s murder, setting himself irrevocably on a path of violence that led to becoming an elite assassin, a Reaper. Years later, his past sins meet his present when he and his partner, Angel are targeted by a man who was once a Reaper too — a man who has been paid to kill, but also has a personal call to settle. Louis and Angel strike back, but when they mysteriously disappear, their friends — must band together to find them. For in a world of kill or be killed, where everyone is corrupt and murderers go unpunished, only betrayals are always avenged.

You can read from the blurb that the story sounds intriguing…in fact it was indeed a fun story. I like the way Connolly switch story from past to present. We had a chance to see Louis’ life and understand him better. We couldn’t hate Louis and his lover, Angel, even though they had killed many people. Louis was The Reaper, an efficient assassin while Angel was nothing but a small time crook trying to break in into Louis’ apartment. It was a destiny that made these two men became lover and partner. The thriller in this book is not too thrilling and quite guessable…but I enjoy the story nevertheless.

The writing is very beautiful. I can’t quite describe it, but you’ll know that John Connolly can really write once you’ve read it. I saw similar comments in goodreads about his beautiful writing. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Seeing her there now, waiting patiently, certain in knowledge that the boy would soon be released into her charge, Wooster could spot the similarities between the woman and her grandson. It wasn’t merely physical, although both carried themselves with the same slim grace. No, something of her disconcerting calm had transferred itself to him. For some reason, Wooster thought of dark, still waters, of sinking into their depths, going deeper and deeper, down, down until suddenly pink jaws opened amid pale luminescence and the nature of the thing itself, the creature that hid those unknown reaches, was finally and fatally revealed.

His writing style and my curiosity over the story were what kept me continue reading it….BUT…Connolly bored me with so many unimportant things to share. I can understand why King needed to explain the background of a lot of characters in The Stand or Under The Dome because those people meant something in the whole story…here, Connolly wrote so many things (few boring pages) about the life of the bartender where they held someone’s birthday….He didn’t even matter in the whole picture. And the bartender was not the only one, he kept doing that all through the book!!

I really wanted to finish the book but that unnecessary information bored me to death…in the end, I skimmed a lot of pages that I found as not important.

Overall…I enjoyed it and felt bored at the same time.

Book Details:

Title: The Reaper
Author: John Connolly
Language: English
Pages: 515 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc
Rating: