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Book Review of The Front (Winston Garano, Bk 2)

The Front (Winston Garano, Bk 2)
Sleepy26177 avatar reviewed on + 218 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 8


Win Garano, still buying used brand name clothes to impress his boss, D. A. Lamont, gets a new assignment: He has to solve the murder of a young British blind girl in Watertown. The case was never solved and Janine Brolin was killed in 1962. District Attorney Monique Lamont smells a huge press spectacle behind this story and already sees herself again rising to be the star in the newspapers. She ties Win into working together with one of the lead investigators of Watertown, and a member of the so called "The FRONT", pretty much independent from the state police. The FRONT are around sixty departments joined in one coalition, sharing their resources and investigation techniques.

When Win's gym bag is stolen from his grandmothers house, he instinctively follows his boss into an empty house and finds evidence that his shoes and the forgotten bottle of wine where used there he doesn't know who to trust. His boss is out of question, his partner from the FRONT seems to follow another agenda: keeping Win away from the case.

He's lost in confusion but still tries to figure out which part belongs to what.

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The second book in Cornwell's Win Garano series isn't
much better than the first one, "At Risk". The characters again or still are a mix of wish-wash, though the reader learns a few new things about one of the main characters D. A. Monique Lamont. Unfortunately she still won't get any sympathy, not from me and probably not from other readers. Her character is still a huge question mark and so much unlikeable. Poor Win doesn't get much character either. If it comes after me, his Nana and her neighbor Miss Murphy, which gets a part of half a page, are more memorable than the rest of the book.

However, I found the book slightly better than "At Risk" but still a huge failure and disappointment. Like in "At Risk" the plot just won't get paced and it seems that the reader has to drag oneself from page to page. Also the book description is highly misleading as the so called FRONT doesn't really play the role of a loose association.
The ending well, it's similar, almost the same, as in "At Risk". No surprises there or anywhere.

Overall, "At Risk" was meant to be published for a newspaper series but ended up as a highly priced Hardcover edition. It wasn't worth the money and so is "The Front": 180 pages of an empty blurb.