Review: Geek Mafia
Last week, I read Geek Mafia by Rick Dakan.
Though this book wasn’t terrible, I can’t really recommend it to anyone. Look, I applaud anyone who can write a whole book and get it published. Just writing a novel-length work is quite an accomplishment, but that doesn’t make it necessarily good. That’s kind of how I feel about Geek Mafia.
The implication of the title is that the book will somehow link “geeks” with some sort of organized crime, which, to me, usually means La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia. But, the author never really quite manages to accomplish this. The book starts with a comic book artist that’s been working for a game company who’s about to be fired dodging work at the bar of a Mexican restaurant. There he meets an attractive free-lancer of some kind who immediately starts to flirt with him. Now, in the real world, this should have set off bells and whistles in this guy’s head, but it doesn’t. Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that a pudgy, almost middle-aged guy completely buys that a pretty girl more than ten years his junior, who he’s just met, is interested in him and doesn’t have any ulterior motive. I know what I think when that’s what seems to be happening to me. Yeah, right, I don’t believe it could be happening to me, but we should believe that this guy totally buys it. What’s more, we should buy it when it turns out to be true.
Well, this girl volunteers to help him get one over on his company and bluff them into giving him a bunch of money instead of the two months severance they want to give him. Again, if this were me, I’d be super, super suspicious, but this joker just completely buys it and goes along, until it’s almost too late. Then, and only then, he gets worried that maybe, just maybe, this girl is too good to be true.
But, all that aside, the writing is just, well, mediocre at best. The author not only uses all the geek and mystery/heist cliches but he over uses them. I mean, this guy really piles them on. In a way, he takes using trite situations and predictable scenarios to an art form. It’s almost like he was trying to make use of every single scene he was given from a writing class or something. It was amazingly formulaic, from the various scams to the main character trying to join the criminal crew, right down to one of the criminal crew betraying him and his new lover.
The whole thing works, on one level, but it’s certainly not “Best Seller” material. It was disappointing in several ways beyond the lackluster writing. For instance, it never really lived up to either promise in the title. There was no mafia in the book and, in fact, barely any organized crime to speak of at all. Nor did it live up to the geek portion, really, either. Any technology or “geekiness” was merely a plot device seen at a distance, at best, and was really not required to move the story forward at all. It could have all pretty much been done some other way without any significant impact. Or, the technology was used at about the same level that pretty much any traveling salesman might use. Laptops and e-mail and all the normal trappings of modern life, not really geeky at all.
And the characters did all sorts of fairly incongruous things, too. They were quite inconsistent, even considering their obviously “hidden” agendas. They were, at times, wholly unbelievable, acting in ways that I cannot imagine any normal, reasonable person acting. Not even perfectly reasonable criminals.
This whole book read like someone attempting NaNoWriMo for the first time and not doing any editing work to the manuscript afterward!
Frankly, I had a lot of hope for this book. The title alone led me to expect an entirely different book. One which I had truly looked forward to reading. Sadly, what was behind that title was not the book I’d hoped to read. So, as appealing as the description of this book may seem, I just cannot recommend it to anyone.
