Location: Australia
Member Since: Oct. 21, 2010

Ted Witham


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Smashwords book reviews by Ted Witham

  • Storyteller on Jan. 23, 2011
    star star star star
    An engaging 'road' story of an apprentice story-teller in post-Roman Wales. The narrator must learn humility before being apprenticed to a master story-teller. Rich in historical detail.
  • Death After Midnight on May 25, 2011
    star star star
    A new genre of popular novel has grown up in the wake of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. This genre combines the actions of a thriller with a mystery concerned with symbols and the Church. Death After Midnight fits this new genre well with explosive action centred around powerful groups looking for what is at the heart of the Priory of Sion. One character after another picks up the narration in Death After Midnight, the action often over-lapping as it is seen by the different story-tellers. It takes a little while to get used to this way of presenting the story, but the interchanges suit this complex plot well. We begin to trust that these disparate people will interact with each other in meaningful ways. Commander Sen Jaared from law-enforcement and Mistress Stel from one of the powerful self-interest groups become the main characters, and the dénouement of the story is not about their relationship, but about the discovery of Jaared's son, Emile. I wasn't sure whether this off-kilter approach to plotting was deliberate, but it meant that this reader has to pay careful attention to stay with the story. We have come to expect that plots in the new genre will drive reasonably straight. None of this spoiled the enjoyment of the book for me. As a French-speaker interested in church history, I was hooked by the subject matter. Unlike Dan Brown, Dean Fetzer includes elements of fantasy and places Death After Midnight in a somewhat dysfunctional future Europe. This surrealism was well achieved. But this novel did show the lack of a good editor. There were typos and errors in the French dialogue which could, and should, have been easily fixed. “Au revoir” is sometimes spelled correctly, and sometimes misspelled as “Au revior”. “Madamoiselle” jumped off the page as inaccurate, and in other places “Mademoiselle” was correctly spelled. A basic French spell-check would have corrected many annoying errors. People – especially people in thrillers – don’t speak in complete sentences. The story would have flowed better with more naturalistic dialogue. And yet, the dialogue achieves well what other novelists have difficulty with: different characters can be recognised from the way they speak, and these different speech patterns are carried quite consistently into the narration as each character picks up the story. Beginning writers are urged to show, not tell, the action. Many times, Fetzer both shows and tells, a belt and braces approach to narrative that can get quite irritating. A character speaks harshly, and their speech is concluded with “he said sternly”. Having shown us the feel of the speech, the adverb jumps out as superfluous. We don’t want to be told as well as shown the underlying tensions between characters. If Dean Fetzer had taken Stephen King’s advice and deleted as many adverbs as possible, the story-telling would have been much more powerful. An editor would also have reined in the sprawl of the plot driving us straighter to a conclusion. As writers, we all learn to write stories by writing them. Dean Fetzer has provided a good yarn, and his next ones will be better.
  • Concerto on July 18, 2011
    star star star
    *Concerto* is a thriller romance in three movements. The narrator, a violinist in the Newton Symphony Orchestra in Ohio is the victim of stalking and harassment ,and she must continue to do her job there working out who really is violent. The suspects narrow to members of the orchestra but it is certainly not the talented Alexis to whom she gives her heart quite early in the story. I enjoyed reading *Concerto*. Its setting - a working orchestra - was intriguing and the villainous action just believable enough to hold me. I wondered whether the book would have worked better in the third person. The first person telling tends to diminish the emotions like fear as the mind too quickly provides reasons to mitigate the rawness of the emotion. Overall, *Concerto* is a pleasant summer read.