Book Reviews: The Exile by Allan Folsom

The first 247 pages of this novel are fast, hard-hitting, exciting, and suspenseful. Unfortunately, this book has about 700 pages.

Starts With an Explosion…

The beginning of Allan Folsom’s The Exile is about as thrilling and intriguing as anything I’ve ever read. It wouldn’t be hyperbole to call it a “page turner.” The thriller begins with a prologue where two men have a secret meeting where it is revealed that footage exists of the murder of one of the men’s sons. Fast forward twenty or thirty odd years (who can keep track?) and several men board a train. Very quickly the reader is introduced to the two main protagonists (if you want to call them that): John Barron and Raymond Thorne. John Barron is the youngest member of the infamous LAPD 5-2 Squad and Raymond Thorne is a dangerous assassin. We don’t know what Raymond is up to, but we know he is cunning and willing to kill anybody who gets in his way.

What follows is a cat-and-mouse, psychological, bloody chase by the LAPD detectives attempting to apprehend this man before he can flee the country. I was engrossed every single step of the way. There’s the psychological duel between John and Raymond as the assassin attempts to use John’s own insecurities against himself and ultimately against his own squad; there’s John’s moral code conflicting with his tenacity to bring Raymond to justice; and behind it all are the hints of something much larger at stake in Raymond’s desperate attempts to flee the country. Imagine a high-octane race between two super-charged Ferraris tearing through the congested streets of LA, and you’ll get a decent idea of what the first part of the book is like.

…Burns Out Like a Slowly Dying Candle

Now imagine these same two Ferraris who have been trading paint, making daring moves that leave you gasping, all while speeding through near miss after near miss suddenly begin obeying the speed limit, part ways, and we begin to debate whether rear wheel drive or front wheel drive would be better if you lived in Minnesota. This is what The Exile felt like in the second half of the book.

247 pages of non-stop adrenaline, and then 400 pages of detailed political conspiracy and cover ups. John Barron and his sister move to Europe to escape people who want to ruin their lives. We begin to focus on the aspects of gardening, attending university, rebuilding fragile psyches, and the intricacies of Russian aristocracy.

The pacing of this book is absolutely atrocious. Pacing. When it’s good, you don’t even notice it. When it’s not, you can feel like you’re in completely separate stories. This novel legitimately feels like there are two authors who had two different ideas about what they should focus on. The first section of the book is really one large chase scene of trying to apprehend Raymond in the streets of LA. The second section of the book deals with political scandal, business and cultural power, as well as romantic imagery of royalty. It’s dull, long, and it just doesn’t make any sense how you could be enjoying the first part so much and then want to shut the book and scratch your head in the second part.

Verdict

I give this book a 4 out of 10 in the Mark of Approval. I want to give it more because of how incredible the first part of the book is, but the last 400 pages are so incongruent and go on and on and on, that I can’t help but say this book was painful to finish. Perhaps if the plot had been smaller, and the scale only included LA, this could have been a fantastic book, but alas…

I almost forgot the very end. Did you ever read Goosebumps? Fantastic books, but they’re written for kids. The very last sentence (the SURPRISE!) sounded like a fourth grader trying to write a zinger into the last page of his short story. Again, par for the course, because it had nothing to do with what had been happening. Don’t read this book, or at least stop at page 247.