I had enjoyed Caldwell's Burning the Map several months ago, and when I read she'd migrated from chick lit to thrillers thought I'd try one before working my way back through her CL books (not that I'm trolling for hot sex scenes in books, but if I were, they seem to be pretty fertile ground). The best part of a Caldwell book is the authenticity of the female characters, and detail of place and things which really grounds the narrative. This book is told from about four points of view (may be more - I lost count) and the odd twist is that one is first person. Interesting tactic, but it helped me because in the early chapters where I couldn't keep track of the characters I was relieved to see "I" because at least I knew who that was - and starting very early I really liked her.
It got to be a hard story to read halfway through because of the secrets at the heart of the central relationship in the book, but that ended earlier than I expected (thank God) and you could watch the hero and heroines deal with the bad guy. But that's when things got a little weird, because the plot went into warp drive - the major action of the book took a couple of pages, it seemed like, and the most uncanny things in the world happened in one or two sentences - literally. For example, the experience of requiring your parents to conduct your funeral as though you'd really died for security reasons is dealt with, literally (as I recall) in two sentences. That's a book in itself, and the way the plot just flew over that was really surprising. I ended up not minding all that much, because I was anxious for the good guys to extract themselves from the villain's clutches (see above about the good characters and why the book got hard to read) but still, it was a bit of a surprise. It was very much like a couple of chapters of the novel's outline never got fleshed out - the action was listed, but there was virtually no description of anything. Although I did like the narrative tactic of describing what happened, and then - when the bodies are on the ground, so to speak - going back and explaining what had happened. Battlestar Galactica does something similar frequently, with an opening scene, then a second scene that is subtitled "two days earlier" which eventually not only explains how the opening scene came about, but also why it doesn't mean what it appeared to initially, out of context.
Caldwell did something very similar here, but the device may have betrayed her somewhat because the explanation was by the first-person narrator - and her ability to recount things in a more protracted format may have been limited by the fact that unlike narrating what was happening as it happened, she was now explaining what had happened - thus no dialogue, and no exposition of things that would have been difficult for her to recount - like the aforementioned "hey mom, I've got people out to kill me and we've faked our deaths, so would you and dad mind having a funeral for me and pretend I'm really dead. Love you - see you soon - b'bye." How you get out of this I'm not sure offhand - but this book didn't. You just had to like the characters enough to not mind being spared the suspense and drama of watching them extract themselves from a life-threatening situation. I did, but that's an odd request for an author to make of a reader.
But I do enjoy the way Caldwell writes, because you can really enjoy the scenes between people and since her characters have a healthy interest in sleeping with each other, it's kind of a voyeuristic experience at times (not that that's a bad thing). Maybe that's what chick lit is like, but if so, it brings a useful spice to the genre, because the other authors I'm reading at the moment (Steve Berry, James Rollins, etc.) don't handle the inner conversations and interpersonal scenes nearly as well as she does. Their plots and technology and backstory are detailed, but the characters interact in a far less "described" way. I'd never forgive Berry for skipping the denouement of one of his books like this, but then, I really don't care much about his characters - I'm still waiting for any of them to have sex, and I've read three books now. (One exception - I really liked Miles Lord, Michael Thorn, and Tsar Nicholas and in The Romano\v Prophecy. But there still wasn't any sex - even with a Russian gymnast. Talk about missed opportunities...).
Anyway, I've already bought Caldwell's The Rome whatever to read next. I'm on the road so much these days that although I had hunted for some time for hardbacks of her books (with no success) the paperbacks are actually better for traveling. Only bad thing is that I now have this indelible association between this book and the back of an airline seat.