Title Tuesday: A Cross to Kill

Welcome to  Title Tuesday, my favorite day of the week! This day is dedicated to book suggestions, news, cartoons, and reviews. I write this portion of my blog because I am a big believer in the motivational speaker Charlie Jones' quote which says, "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.” I try to meet as many new people as possible and to read everything I can. This is my way of sharing that information with you. You can see a visual summary of the books I have reviewed for both adults and children over on my Facebook page. If you are interested in understanding my rating system for books you can read my Book Review Explanation here and What I Believe here. If you want to check out what I am currently reading or what I want to read next, friend me on Goodreads!

I review a LOT of books on my blog. Few of the books I review are excellent, many of the books I review are good, and every so often a book comes along that I just don't like. Unfortunately today's review is one of those.

A Cross to Kill by Andrew Huff is a cringe inducing hodgepodge-like mashup of every action movie you can imagine, just with a Christian as the lead man. I wanted to like this book, especially because it was billed as a Christian suspense novel. Unfortunately nothing about this book quite hit the mark the most glaring misses in my opinion were the lukewarm characters and the unrealistic action scenes. 

Lets tackle the characters first. Theses are some flat and stereotypical people, almost to the point of being carved out of an archetypal cast. Lead character John is a brooding, ex-military man that found Jesus and is trying to turn his life around when the bad guys find him. The lead female character is a highly motivated career woman that begins to question her purpose in life after meeting this broody man, despite the fact that she knows next to nothing about him. The budding romance between John and Christine reads like a Hallmark Channel movie written for men, complete with phrases like "chocolate eyes" and "shapely figure". 
  
Even if the characters were a little flat I would have still given this book a B if it had not been for the fight scenes and the discussion of Christine's kidnapping.
- Fighting on top of a moving train (and falling asleep on it?!) is one of the most overused action scenes in modern fiction.
-Car chases where bullets are shot at random? That is a national disaster and would have people screaming for gun control.
-Terrorist organizations like the one that abducted Christine in the beginning of the book wouldn't have just slapped her a few times and then let her go. She would have been badly beaten, maimed and raped. Her hair would not be long like it appears in this book trailer (which you can see here: https://player.vimeo.com/video/356727790). Torture has a much more significant impact than what was written here.
-Both John and Christine go through some pretty rough things and yet PTSD doesn't seem to factor in to their lives at all. In fact the few times that John's past is a problem he is able to tamper it down and move on as though it wasn't a major life changing event.

Overall, I give this book a solid C-. It is an easy and boring read that is difficult to want to finish.