Martin Molsted

I received this book free of charge from the publisher, back in 2013 for reviewing purposes and apparently missed its arrival, so now 7 years later I've actually read it (sorry publisher!).

Chasing the Storm is a reasonable thriller, bit of sea faring adventure, bit of cat and mouse spy style thriller as a journalist and a ex-operative now office worker cross paths, the later decides he wishes to help the former after coming to his aid in an attempted assassination. This sees the two men and a small entourage attempt to solve the hijacking of a ship in international waters, a ship which is meant to be carrying timber, but may in fact be carrying something far more nefarious.

I found that it took a little while to warm up but once going it was a decent read in settings not commonly used in books of this genre which is always a nice touch.

Worth having a look if you enjoy international thrillers.… (meer)

I was unable to finish this book. The pacing slowed remarkably and then the plot began meandering around as if in search of itself. There were side threads introduced that appeared to have little or no relevance and I kept forgetting the point of the story as a result. Another reviewer called it an "interesting theme of a man going through a mid-life crises." I don't find that an interesting topic and I picked this because it was supposed to be a crime thriller, not a midlife crisis story. Yet another reviewer noted the ingredients were there but the author was unable to pull it all together successfully. Well put!

For instance, despite the crime thriller label, repeatedly, whole paragraphs (if not pages) are spent having one of the two male MC's (it was still not clear which one was supposed to be the protagonist with whom I was intended to identify and I never identified with anyone) leering at a female character. In addition to being rude and offensive to female readers, it was an utter distraction to the plot that kept snapping me out of the story.

There was zero connection between the characters, so I saw no point to the large chunks of text spent on this side thread but the author kept returning to it as though it was relevant. Midlife crises indeed! The female character expressed no interest back so either the author intended the MC to later commit an act of sexual assault and was establishing this sexual interest early on or--more likely--the author was trying to give the MC some depth but failed miserably because the "depth" was utterly irrelevant to the plot. It was enough of a distraction that I don't even know why the female character existed except to BE a distraction that could fill a few hundred or thousand words. She was never developed with any personity at all, like a 2D stage prop. One reviewer actually called this a love interest--really? Leering at someone who ignores you is a love interest in storytelling now?

Overall, this had very poor plotting and story construction. Great ideas but very poor execution. Totally took me out of being a reader and into noticing the author behind the scenes. Given it's supposed to be a thriller, I should have been gripped by the plotting and found the pacing fast not meandering so I have to say it failed on both of those counts.

Sorry, but this was barely a 2-star read, which is why it took me so long to post a review. I hate having to say bad things about a fellow author's work. The one good thing I can say is that the author had very little trouble with the English language but there were sentence structures indicating it was not his mother tongue. Still, he did better at stringing words together sensibly than has been done by some of the native speakers publishing in the US markets today!… (meer)

I received a copy of this novel through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme in exchange for an honest review. This review in its entirety was originally posted at caffeinatedlife.net: http://www.caffeinatedlife.net/blog/2014/05/02/review-chasing-the-storm/

What’s really interesting about this novel is that it takes a lot of real-time current events and features them in the plot of the novel: missing ships taken over, corrupt politicians, shady businesses, determined journalists to undercover the truth, hotspot locations around the world fraught with turmoil…It’s also quite a geopolitical chase; one minute they’re in Germany, the next they’re in Russia, then they’re in Egypt. It’s pretty crazy but it keeps the adrenaline of the story going.

I’m not sure what to make of the characters, however. They’re interesting enough, but there wasn’t much hint at the beginning of the novel to indicate that Ryggs' past. It just seemed like such a jump in character between the man the reader meets in the first two chapters and the man the reader follows for the rest of the novel.I may have missed this detail but Marin seemed to be a little too well-off financially to be able to pull off such an investigation.

While appearing seemingly separate from Ryggs and Marin’s storyline, it was interesting to read about what was going on at the ship that the two were investigating and the conditions that they were left to survive in during that tumultuous period.

Nonetheless, for a thriller and a debut novel, Chasing the Storm is a page-turner. I found myself pretty glued to the story after a while, hoping to learn exactly what was going on and whether Dmitri, the character readers follow onboard the ship, will make it.… (meer)