The Angel Collector by Bali Rai

My boss told me to read this one - I think she liked it better than I did. It's hard to define why exactly it didn't do it for me, but I think it's mostly stylistic.

The Angel Collector is a sort of thriller - Jit's best friend Sophie is kidnapped from a music festival, and eight months later he finds he can't just sit around when he believes she's still out there. So mostly it's Jit talking to people, piecing together clues. There are also segments from the point of view of Sophie's kidnapper, and excerpts from Jit & Sophie's emails and MSN conversations. The story ends quite suddenly, and perhaps the whole thing wasn't as cohesive as I would have liked.

The segments from the kidnapper's POV particularly bugged me; it's the whole thing where you talk about them without naming names, being very oblique, and rather than finding it intriguing, it annoys me. I was also put off, in the main text, by the dialogue - which was written the way I suppose the characters would have spoken, but as they're British and I'm not, it was quite hard-going.

In the end I wasn't convinced by the story - I was reading it, but not getting involved in it. Despite being in first person, Jit's actions didn't always make sense to me. I just couldn't get into it, and though the climax should have been exciting, I just wasn't there. So in all, somewhat of a disappointment.