Stay

3.5 stars. The cover of this book doesn't do it service, I have to say. Although predictable, this is a heart-pounding thriller with a dash of family fun (two things that don't usually go together but there we go). The premise is a great idea for a TV show, which is why I wasn't surprised that the rights has been sold to CBS.

I must say that it sort of bugs me that everything I read about this book mentions the deal with CBS for the rights – I'm happy for Gischler, but that doesn't make me want to read it more (or less). Still, Stay can at times seem like a really thorough pitch for a movie deal.

Beyond that – I was a little disappointed. Gischler takes so many suspense novel mainstays – the special ops guy with a troubled past forced into violence to protect his family, the paranoid old service buddy who's an expert hacker and willing to drop everything to help his pal, the foreign mobsters who will stop at nothing . . . yada yada yada. There was virtually nothing new here. Now just because you have so many genre tropes, doesn't mean the book has to be hacky (I'm not saying this was, but you could see hacky from the front porch) – take Finder's Nick Heller books. Almost entirely the same tropes, but Finder pulls it off. Gischler doesn't.

The dialogue was mediocre, the characters were thin, the sex was a touch too detailed, the violence was about right (maybe a less detailed than expected a few times). One thing I don't need is the same narrator justifying the use of a head-butt twice in the same novel – and almost in identical terms.

Ultimately, I wanted more. More surprise, more details, more originality to the characters, more depth to David and Amy (and heck, the bad guys as well). There wasn't enough grit, enough horror, enough....anything. I guess you could say that I think this was a good start – but not a good final draft. Entertaining enough to keep me turning the page. But could've been so much more.