According to Hoyle by Abigail Roux

Title: According to Hoyle
Author: Abigail Roux
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Length: Novel (88k/254 pgs)
Buy the book: Publisher

Blurb:

By the close of 1882, the inhabitants of the American West had earned their reputation as untamed and dangerous. The line between heroes and villains is narrow and indistinct. The concept that a man may only kill if backed into a corner is antiquated. Lives are worth less than horses. Treasures are worth killing for. And the law is written in the blood of those who came before. The only men staving off total chaos are the few who take the letter of the law at its word and risk their lives to uphold it. But in the West, the rules aren’t always played according to Hoyle.

US Marshals Eli Flynn and William Henry Washington are escorting two prisoners to New Orleans for trial when they discover there’s more to the infamous shootist Dusty Rose and the enigmatic man known only as Cage than merely being outlaws. When forces beyond the marshals’ control converge on the paddlewheeler they have hired to take them downriver, they must choose between two dangers: playing by the rules at any cost or trusting the very men they are meant to bring to justice.

Review:

If there’s one word to describe this novel, it’s complex. It starts with the basic plot, the tale of two US marshals responsible for transporting three criminals for their judgments. Flynn and Wash are a little bit older, a little more world-weary, each fascinating in his own right. Their prisoners are a trio of diversity – the mute Cage, the thug Hudson, and the dandy gunslinger Dusty Rose. Men are out to kill Rose, ever since he refused to get involved in a heist of a mysterious artifact, but Flynn is determined to deliver him, regardless of how unsure Wash is. In the midst of all this is the man who actually took on the artifact job, the evil Stringer. The story winds along from fascinating development to fascinating development, spurred by characters that rise above Western archetypes to become fully fleshed, entertaining people.

And yet, I can with all honesty admit I won’t be picking up the second book. I’m also less likely to purchase future work by this author, even though I’ve enjoyed her work in the past.

It bugs me to admit that. This book has a ton of great stuff going for it. The setting is richly explored, as vivid and realistic as the men who inhabit it. The men themselves aren’t flat caricatures or easy to predict. They’re full of surprises, as the best characters can be. The plot itself is intriguing enough to keep pulling me along, and if the artifact never really got explored well, I was okay with that, because it was about the journey to get there, not the actual goal. So in light of all that, why isn’t this a keeper?

It all comes down to authorial voice. The prose chokes on its own verbosity, with redundant adverbs and dialogue tags dragging down any sense of pace and destroying my enjoyment.

It’s a symptom I got mired in with this author’s collaborative work, too. They have a very popular series that I could barely get through the first book of because of its overuse of dialogue tags and adverbs. That same symptom is on display in this, though admittedly, the dialogue tag abuse isn’t quite as severe (it wasn’t uncommon in the collaborative work to find three, four, even five tags within a single paragraph of spoken dialogue, all from the same person, sometimes even repeating a tag). Still, it’s very much in evidence:

“What? Why?” Rose questioned incredulously. “Who gives a Boston dollar if they get the gold? Let them have it!”

“No,” Flynn gritted out. “If we do that, then you’ll go and save your man and absquatulate while the rest—”

“Ab—what now?” Rose interrupted in confusion.

“Run off! Disappear!” Flynn hissed in utter frustration.

“Well, if you mean run off then say run off!” Rose whispered in the same frustrated tone.

“You’ll save your man and run off, then!” Flynn shot back as he covered his head with his hands in aggravation.

“Are you more concerned about me escaping or about retrieving those men?” Rose questioned angrily.

The majority of the dialogue is characterized with these sorts of tags, and often with some sort of addition to it, either an adverb, a prepositional phrase, or a dependent clause. It ends up creating a repetitive and redundant reading experience, slowing down pacing when I needed it to be more urgent or throwing me out of the story by reminding me that I’m reading in the first place.

The adverb abuse is just as bad. They litter the dialogue tags as well as the rest of the prose. Finding sentences like this, Cage blinked rapidly at him and Gabriel smiled crookedly., is not uncommon. Their prevalence just reminds me that I’m being told a story, not shown it, and I crave getting details that will put me in the action rather distance me even further.

Do I think this is a deal breaker for other readers? Absolutely not. The fact that the plot and characters are so interesting will be more than enough for a lot of people to not even notice things like this. It wouldn’t even be a deal breaker for me if it happened a couple of times within the text. My problem arises from its frequency. I tripped over redundancies and weak verbs (the single most common reason for the adverbs) on nearly every page, so while I can certainly give the story its appropriate kudos for the characters and basic ideas, I can’t rate it any higher than I have because of the technical issues.