Lemoncella Cocktail by Rene Natan

The Synopsis:

Because of his troubled past, twenty-five-year-old Patrick Carter is determined to live a life without confrontation. A lifeguard by day and a bartender by night, he’s content with his care-free daily routine, whiling away the summer on the shores of Lake Huron in southern Ontario.
But one day, as he walks along the Ausable River on his way home, a cry for help makes him plunge into the river’s strong current and pull fourteen-year-old Samantha McLeod to safety. Samantha, believed to be a witness to a massive weapons exchange, is marked to death by ruthless arms dealers—along with the man who saved her.
A task force, established to safeguard the country against terrorist attacks, hunts down Oscar Calander, responsible for the weapons trade that is spreading from the Yukon to Ontario. They don’t spare efforts or technological advances, even using drones in the attempt to destroy the deadly traffic.
Patrick Carter is not keen on cooperating with the task force, reluctant to move from his comfort zone to a world of suspicion and violence. He wavers—and his hesitation could be costly.

I received this book from the author/publisher via Online Book Club for the purpose of this review. All comments and opinions are entirely my own.

Review:

Being in the right place at the right time to save someone’s life is what many main characters experience, but do they always view it that way, or are they going to say “wrong place at the wrong time”?

In this national defense thriller novel, Lemoncella Cocktail, we are taken to Canada following Patrick, a young man with a battered past he is desperately trying to “cope” with. As his unfortunate luck goes, he finds himself walking along the riverside, at night, and after hearing a cry for help, rescues a girl from the current. The heroic act throws his entire world upside down, yet despite this, he handles every single situation with an attitude that I could only imagine being accompanied with an “I don’t care” shrug.

In addition to the characters being unrealistic, the author seemed to spend more time describing what the characters ate for dinner than writing scenes in which build up suspense or give us an adrenaline rush, which is kind of expected in a thriller. So I find it impossible to classify this novel as a thriller even though the topic at hand is illegal weapons and a target on the girl’s back.

Also, the grammar and formatting of this novel is unlike anything I’ve ever read in a published book. Every other word in a sentence, throughout the entire novel, was randomly put in bold. Sometimes, it would be half a sentence in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes a full paragraph with random words not in bold, and then other times it was just one or two letters in the middle of a word, completely random and without purpose.

There is also a decent amount of cursing used, some sexual comments (no scenes), and mild action that contains mildly detailed graphics.

The story itself would have been intriguing with the proper scenes to create suspense and perhaps I would have been able to focus on the story better, had the book undergone at least some basic editing processes to catch the misspellings and other errors. Overall, I give this book 1 out of 5 stars and do not recommend it.