Review: Of Madness and Misadventure

Review: Of Madness and Misadventure by Marjorie Townsend

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

I wish I didn’t feel as conflicted as I did. On the one hand, this is a pretty solid story with a beginning, middle, and end. On the other hand, it feels like it took forever to get there. I wish I felt better about the story.

Don’t get me wrong. There were things I liked about it. Madison, Freddie, and Lou are solid characters, and their viewpoints are nice to see. Each character is easy to distinguish in the story and seeing them all come together in the plot is nice. I’ve seen this kind of structure work before, and I think it’s handled decently here. However, I did have some problems with it and the story.

Before we get into all of that, let’s get into the summary.

Summary

The story opens with Madison and Lou, two law enforcement officers, on their honeymoon in Florida. While they are there, however, a string of homicides pops up right where they’re vacationing, and they find that the honeymoon may not be as relaxing as they’d hoped. While they are working on the homicides, however, their last case from Fresno comes back to bite them when a hitman is sent after Madison in revenge for the earlier case.

Can Madison solve the homicides and escape the hitman before it’s too late?

Thoughts

So, I wish I didn’t feel so conflicted. My main problem with the alternating viewpoints here is small, but it detracted from my enjoyment of the story quite a bit.

I had bigger problems with the pacing, though.

I feel like we took forever to get to the climax of the story because there’s so much being juggled here! There are all these characters’ viewpoints and how they play into the story, there’s so many different events happening with each of them, and then we get scenes where these characters are intersecting, so we’ll get the same scene from two different perspectives, which in my opinion is a mistake.

Anyway, I’ll dive more into those issues when I discuss the structure. Let’s get into characters!

Characters

Madison

“We flew into Florida on October 5^th. As soon as that gulf breeze hit my face, I knew I was in heaven. I just stood there inhaling the salt air. I took a deep breath and held it just for a second or two. I wanted to clean out of my lungs the pollution from Fresno.”

I liked Madison. She was a good main character and a great law enforcement officer who cared about her job. I enjoyed seeing her put her all into solving a case and it was interesting to see the conclusions she came to when working on them.

Another thing I liked about her working on the cases was how she called her intuition her “spidey-sense.” Now, I just saw Marvel’s Spider-Man trilogy recently, so I knew exactly what she meant, and it added tension to the story. That said, I can see a problem with it as well – what if a reader has no clue what the spider-sense is? While it works if you know the source Townsend is drawing from, I can see it alienating certain readers that don’t know what that means.

Anyway, moving on to her relationships. I liked her relationship with Lou a lot. It was obvious that they were very close as husband and wife and I enjoyed seeing them stick by each other. However, I did have one small problem with their relationship. Why, in the first half of the novel especially, is Madison so incredibly hungry for sex? I get that they’re on their honeymoon, but it started happening in places where I wasn’t comfortable with it, and it was occurring what felt like every one of her chapters for a little while. Maybe it’s just me. I mainly have this issue because it was occurring in places other than the bed, and I personally feel uncomfortable with scenes like that because I associate sex with the bed. It might just be me, though. It could be completely normal honeymoon behavior and I don’t realize it.

Lou

“Just as I expected, Lou was overdoing it and had already boarded up three windows. You can’t keep a good man down. Not mine, that’s for sure. Already he was making some big points with my mom and like typical Lou fashion, he had her eating out of his hands. He was seriously putting on the charm. He just had a way that could completely mesmerize you. I fell under that same spell so why wouldn’t my mom.”

I liked Lou as well. It was interesting to see his reaction to the Evan Reynolds’ case and how he is still dealing with some trauma from it. I like that Townsend doesn’t go into a full breakdown of this, only leaving subtle hints that he is suffering. To me, it made it sadder, because I know how it feels to have something bothering you at the back of your mind and how you try to go about life anyway.

Aside from Madison, seeing his relationship with Frank was nice. Their trips to the lab to learn more about the homicide victims was interesting, and even seeing them just hanging out at the hotel having drinks was nice. It showed that there was real friendship there, and I always love seeing that.

Freddie

“If all went well, with this one, he could continue satisfying the urge to kill without any consequences. He had several more days before it hit. At first, he thought he would have to dispose of the bodies which always carried the possibility of getting caught. Now, he didn’t and no one would be the wiser.”

Oh, I’ve been waiting to talk about this guy!

Freddie’s sections were the most interesting, but horrifying, in the book for me. Seeing him deal with his victims in different ways and how he left the owl drawings to make his mark for the police was gripping!

I also appreciate that we see what made Freddie what he is. Going into his backstory shows why he’s so messed up, and I love that Townsend doesn’t shy away from how horrific it all is. Seeing the situation that spurred Freddie to become a serial killer adds a degree of feeling bad for him, but I was so horrified by how he dealt with the inciting incident that he’s easily the most frightening character in this story for me!

Henry

“The man lit a cigarette as he stood in the parking garage. Taking a long hit, he let the smoke swirl in his mouth before blowing it out. That is the best part about the South. People still actually smoke cigarettes, not those funny e-cigs. He tried one once and it just didn’t have the coolness effect an actual cigarette does.”

Oh, Henry… I wish I were afraid of you. I think that’s what Townsend was going for. Unfortunately, you don’t scare me.

When I learned why Henry was in the plot at all, I was nervous for Madison, but as time went on, that anxiety went away because he was taking forever to make his move! He wasn’t a very good criminal, which is a shame, because I could see how he could have been.

But it’s not all bad. I liked how he made friends with those surfers on the beach and how much he enjoyed the activity. That said, I just wish there had been less surveillance on Madison with him and more legitimate planning and prepping. Maybe we could see him deciding on a weapon to use or something. But there needed to be more tension somehow. Anyway, that problem deals more with structure, so I’ll go into it more there.

Structure

Okay, I have quite a few problems with the structure Townsend has here. This may take some time to explain. It’s not that it can’t work, or even that it doesn’t work well in certain parts here. I don’t have an issue with alternating viewpoints in a story, I have a problem with there being too many of them. I think Townsend was using too many characters’ perspectives. By the time I would finish one viewpoint, I would flip to the next and go, “Wait, we’re dealing with you now? Who are you, again?”

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel actually deals with the same structure of the alternating viewpoints. The difference with Station Eleven is that there’s a central character at the head of the narrative tying all the viewpoints together. Townsend doesn’t do something like that, so it’s harder to see how all these characters come together.

Take the character Nacho, for example. He only has one or two chapters to his viewpoint, so by the time I was done, I was wondering why he was needed at all. Why not have his information divulged in Lou’s chapters? Have Lou get that all-important phone call and give the information to Madison in his next chapter. You can even have Lou explain why they’re after her, because Nacho could give that intel over the phone! You can even keep Nacho as a character and give him dialogue. He just didn’t need his own chapters, in my opinion.

Another problem I have with the structure is how Townsend will introduce an idea and then drop it in the middle of the story, only to pick it up again at the end! That’s exactly what happens to the storm/hurricane coming to Florida, and I was kind of annoyed that it was like everyone had just forgotten about this tropical storm that was supposed to hit. It made the tension that comes out at the end feel like it came out of nowhere. I’d forgotten the opening hook by that point, so the storm didn’t consistently feel like a threat. Instead, we get the same restaurant scene from two different perspectives, which (while I can see why it was done) felt repetitive. This bogs down the story and takes away tension.

Also, like I promised to explain, we see the tension dropped with Henry, too, because of the way the story is set up. There’s a scene where he’s stalking Madison and Madison smells his cigarette smoke, but literally nothing happens with him after that! I would’ve liked to see something, like him planning how to kill her, not watching her car leave the hotel with a beer in hand saying, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” He just lost what originally made me nervous about him. He was no longer a threat.

Writing

Townsend can write, and her writing here is actually really good. She can build a scene and knows how to set up tension. The problem with her writing is that she waits too long to pay off tension, if that makes sense. There are some serious issues with pacing in here because she’s juggling too much at once, so that tension is lost by the time we actually get to the payoff.

That said, she excels at setting up characters in her writing. Madison, Lou, Henry, Freddie – you can see how they’re all different, and even though she’s only giving Madison the first-person perspective, we can see how each character is distinct from another.

Her writing is descriptive enough to pull you in and keep you in a scene, which is great for worldbuilding purposes. She knows how to keep you in a scene (as long as it’s not repeating). Speaking of, I did have issues with that one restaurant scene repeating from two different perspectives. I understand why it was done, but it didn’t feel needed. Why not have that one scene from Freddie’s perspective and have Henry come in? Have Freddie be suspicious of him right away and then dive into Henry’s perspective and go into more detail about what he is aiming to do, and there you go! It takes away the repetitiveness of the writing and improves the structure at the same time.

Conclusion

Like I said earlier, I wish I felt better about this story than I do. Townsend has woven an interesting narrative here, but I wasn’t really blown away by it once I got into it. This is mainly because of the story being bogged down by too many perspectives and there was information in some of those perspectives that didn’t really feel needed.

There’s a decent plot here, and I like most of the characters quite a bit. I just think the writing needed to be more concise and the padding removed. Then I think it would be truly gripping and hard to put down.

As it is, it’s mainly okay, but okay is not enough for me. I’m afraid I can only award this 2.5 stars, rounded up to three. Still, I think I’m in the minority when it comes to this story, so it’s possible it might just be me. But I do know that, in order to keep me engaged in a story, you have to set something up and either implicitly or explicitly tell me that you’re going to follow through with what you’re setting up, so I don’t think you’ve forgotten it.

That said, I think I would recommend this for people who enjoy stories with multiple perspectives, because it’s interesting to see all the different characters and how they come together. And I can certainly say that the story is definitely interesting, and that fact alone kept me coming back no matter what.