Tara Sharp

Book 1: Sharp Shooter

Allen & Unwin (2009)
ISBN: 9781741759310
$29.99
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Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack, Month 2009


Sharp Shooter suffers from one main problem: how strongly it's aligned itself with Janet Evanovich's work. If you're going to emblazon your cover with the advice that a book is for fans of another author, you'd better make sure your novel delivers similar strengths to that author - and for me, Sharp Shooter doesn't match up to Evanovich. That's not to say it's a bad book; it's actually a rather good one, but I'd probably have enjoyed it a lot more if I wasn't constantly comparing it to Evanovich.

If you're not familiar with Janet Evanovich, she writes light and fluffy novels. She's probably best known for her Stephanie Plum novels - humorous crime. Stephanie Plum is broke, unemployed, and not really qualified for anything, and in desperation takes on a job as a bounty hunter. She's far from a natural at it, but manages well enough to survive (both financially and literally). Romantically, she's torn between the mesmerising and mysterious Ranger, and the less mysterious but equally sexy Joe Morelli. The novels are light on plot, strong on characterisation, and generally very funny. The “main” Plum stories all feature a number in the title, such as One for the Money. Evanovich has also written a number of between the numbers novelettes featuring Stephanie; in these novelettes magic exists. No-one actually calls it magic, but that's what it is. These novels are just as enjoyable and convincing as the “straight” Plum novels.

And that's what Sharp Shooter wants to measure itself against. Unfortunately, its strengths are very different.

Sharp Shooter focuses on Tara Sharp. Broke, unemployed, and not really qualified for anything, Tara finds herself living in her parent's garage and desperate for cash. Her only asset appears to be her ability to “read” people's auras, and even that she's not too good at. So Tara sets out to learn how to read auras more accurately and then make money from this skill. Desperate to earn something, she accepts a rather dodgy investigation job from a very dodgy lawyer. Before she knows it, Tara is up to her neck in trouble - people are lying to her, people are threatening her, people are trying to kill her, and the subject of her investigation – Nick Tozzi - is proving to be more attractive than she really likes, especially as he's married.

So here's the first thing. I didn't find the novel funny at all, even when it was trying to be. Barely raised a smile most of the time. Which is okay, because the novel reads perfectly well if you're not looking for humor. But because of the Evanovich claim, I was looking for humor. And I think Delacourt was trying to provide it. Tara's parents, for example, seem designed to provide humorous moments, but these sections were trying too hard to work for me. The same applied to a number of other characters - they seemed to have been developed for humorous purposes, but it was just too strained to be effective.

The next major thing was that the characters, as a rule, didn't ring as true as Evanovich's. Many of the characters in Evanovich's Plum books are downright lunatics; most are at the very least off-centre. And they're often engaged in the most bizarre conversations or activities. But you believe in them. Evanovich has a knack of bringing them to life, and making them seem that they fit perfectly into their world, as if you could very well meet them on the street one day. Delacourt's characters are objectively far more realistic, and yet they lack that spark that makes them come to life. Often, they seem constructed to a lukewarm template. Tara has all the characteristics of someone you might meet in Perth tomorrow, but will I remember her a week after finishing the novel? I suspect not.

The other critical difference with Evanovich's novels is that the romance in Sharp Shooter didn’t strike me as all that compelling. All that Nick seemed to have to offer Tara was sexiness. There wasn't much of a spark between them, and I just didn't find it believable that Tara would be more than passingly interested in him. On the other hand, Evanovich makes it not only believable that Stephanie would jump Ranger or Morelli in a moment - but that you, the reader, would do so too if you got the chance. More importantly, she makes them believable relationship material. Nick Tozzi, on the other hand? You wouldn't bother.

So let's just forget that whole Evanovich thing - if you can - and focus on Sharp Shooter as a novel you've picked up with no preconceptions. On that basis, it's a pretty good read, although it's going to work better for fans of crime fiction than fans of speculative fiction. The only real element of speculative fiction here is Tara's ability to read auras, and in all honesty that comes across more as a half-hearted plot device than anything else. Little real use is made of her ability to read auras. Basically, apart from providing a means for Tara to meet the person who inadvertently gets her tangled up in the nasty crimes, her ability is used precisely once in the novel to do something that couldn't be achieved by “I had a feeling”. It's quite strange, because this element could have been used more extensively, and could have set Sharp Shooter apart from the general run of crime novels, but it just sort of gets ignored. I was quite disappointed, because this was one of the aspects of the novel that intrigued me when I read the blurb. Perhaps Delacourt will make better use of this if there's another Tara novel.

However, there's a complex and believable crime plot underlying the story of Sharp Shooter. It's believable in general terms, but also specifically in the Australian setting - some of the general tropes of crime writers work less well in Perth than in New York, and Delacourt has skilfully avoided falling into that trap. There are chords that will be familiar to regular readers of crime fiction, but not so many that the plot seems familiar or cliched. The plot, in fact, was one of the greatest strengths of the novel. Credible, fairly fast moving, and resolved in a believable fashion - if perhaps, a little too neatly and quickly to be entirely satisfactory. However, if you’re not writing a novel as detailed and intricate as, say, Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley novels, it is hard to avoid the impression of tying everything up with a neat bow at the end of a crime novel. It is necessary to resolve all or most of the major plot strands to keep your reader happy.

Sharp Shooter was a readable novel. The prose was unobtrusively well-written, making for a quick and pleasant reading experience. Although none of the characters connected strongly with me, most were believable enough. It was an enjoyable read, and if there's another in the series, I'll probably read it. But it didn't fulfil the promise implied in the comparison with Janet Evanovich; and it didn't fulfil the promise implied in the idea of a private investigator who reads auras. Hopefully Delacourt was just finding her feet and any future novels in the series will be a little stronger.