Book #23 of 2024: Chase | DNF: The Dry Lands

Chase by Linwood Barclay.

Quick synopsis: A secret government agency is making spy dogs -- dogs full of high tech cybernetic gear.

Brief opinion: This middle grade book would insult the intelligence of any middle grader who read it.

Plot: Set in the real world and current time, a super secret evil government agency is taking dogs, stuffing them full of high tech gear, and using them to spy.

One hyper-intelligent dog, Chipper, is a failure and escapes the lab before they can put him down.

The head of this super secret evil government agency forces the scientist who was outsmarted by Chipper to swallow a dog tranquilizer while showing him that as soon as he passes out, she's going to put him down the same way one would a dog. She literally murders her employees for making a mistake. This is apparently a common thing at the super secret evil government agency.

Once Chipper is free, chapters alternate between the dog, the main character boy (Jeff) who lives with his Aunt Flo (gods above, the author is an older man, but did not one person who read this story before it was published tell him what Aunt Flo is a euphemism for?), and the super secret evil government agents who are trying to recapture Chipper.

Aunt Flo, like every other adult in this book, is useless, mean, and oftentimes just evil for evil's sake. Among other things, she forced the 12 year old Jeff to drive a pickup truck on a regular basis, bullying him when he said he shouldn't or didn't want to.

Most of the book was just the super evil bad guys chasing Jeff and Chipper. The book concluded with the head of the super evil bad guys deciding she now wanted to experiment on human children as well as dogs.

Writing/editing: The technical writing/editing was fine. The plot writing was painfully bad. Awful. I feel like I lost IQ points because I read this book. I was angry when I finished it; how did this book get published when so many better ones don't! And the poor trees that died to make paper to print this god awful book!

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: The positive first, and the only reason I didn't DNF the book: I liked the early Chipper chapters, when he was in the lab and had just escaped.

But everything else in this book was awful and stupid. There was zero logic. Nothing made sense.

For example, so this evil agency was trying to make spy dogs to send into other countries because "no one notices dogs". Why would they pick Chipper? A border collie with "unique markings" (black around one eye, white around the other). Would you not want a dog to blend in? Something that looks like a mutt or a street dog? Border collies are striking!

Chipper flunked out of the program because he was too distractible, he couldn't override his instincts. Again, why on earth would you pick a border collie if you wanted a dog that could override its instincts!

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: A quarter star. It's my blog and I can rate it under 1 if I want to, though on Goodreads I'll have to round up to 1. It would be a zero star if not for the few chapters I liked.

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DNF #16: The Dry Lands (A Tribal Song – Tales of the Koriba Book 1) by Simon J. Townley. Set in prehistoric times, the main character is a boy with a crippled foot. (Why is that so common in these books? I've read countless prehistoric stories where the male main character has a crippled or missing foot.)

Anyway, this self-published* book had a number of logic/plot issues and the editing wasn't very good (misspellings, issues with punctuation, etc). (*It has a "publisher" that has only ever published Townley's books...) I made it about a third of the way through the book before DNFing it.