Lora Hates Spam

by Hunter Shea

The first chapter seemed to keep switching between present and past tense. Twins witness their parents killed by presumably the Loch Ness monster while on holiday. We jump ahead to the twins grown up and settle into mostly present tense.

Natalie is obsessed with hunting down the monster that killed her parents, with the obvious difficulty that most people don't believe Nessie exists. Eventually her brother joins in the hunt after not seeing each other for several years. They've grown up and have much to discover about each other.

The narrative lacks realism. There's no plan for hunting the creature that isn't suicidal and guaranteed to cause some close calls.

I've enjoyed Shea stories before, but on this one I feel he sort of dropped the ball. For one thing I regard whole novels written in present tense trend as the stuff of very young Romance writers who didn't pay attention in English class. There were a few glaring typos or wrong form of words and the plot was overly predictable and lacking suspense.

I did get a laugh from a particularly good one-liner and to be fair, there were some dramatic scenes towards the end but again, they were a little too difficult to suspend disbelief. Definitely not Shea's best work.