BOOK REVIEW: Reasonable Facsimile by Chris Shella

Reasonable Facsimilie by Chris Shella

Paperback:  186 pages
Publisher:  Digisoda Publishing (December 1, 2011)
Language:  English

Synopsis:

Can Jasper Davis pull himself from his life of loose women, liquor and general debauchery in enough time to win a murder case and possibly save his own hide?  

Jasper Davis is a criminal trial lawyer in Baltimore who has slowly but surely become like the drug dealers and lowlifes he represents.  He spends more time with hookers than clients and more time drinking Jack Daniels than studying the lawbooks.  Simply put...he is a shade of his former self.  

Jasper finds himself in the middle of a first degree murder trial when he becomes the suspect in the murder of a DEA agent who has set to testify against his client.  Jasper is so far gone on women and liquor he sees his trial skills deteriorate right before his eyes.  Jasper is confronted by the situation is he gonna continue to be a reasonable facsimile of a human being or is he gonna become the man he once was?

My Thoughts:

While I was impressed with the title of the book and how the other explains it via the main character, Jasper Davis a.k.a. JD.  I thought it was a nice way to set the tone for the book's plot and how the character interacts with his surroundings and was looking forward to an enjoyable read.

However, I was wrong.  

I couldn't find myself caring for JD, I thought he was a cliché and a stereotype and I found it truly hard to get past the lack of any depth to the character.  I found his introduction of women, by their breast size and skin colour and sometimes even their "booty" size was quite frustrating and removed me from the story.  I thought one or two examples of such would've sufficed but every single time a women is briefly in a paragraph??  And no, I did not find that it set the character up with this kind of drivel, I found it removed from the character of JD, instead of enhancing him.

I thought that the antagonist or the criminal, Billy Badass, that JD was representing wasn't overly believable in the explanation and found the whole trial to be without emotion and found myself seeing the trial as a prop to undergo the "transformation" of JD.  

I found the vulgarity of the story to be repetitive and didn't carry well with the overall story as there was too much of it, drawing away from the literary aspect that the story had the potential to become.

I would give Reasonable Facsimile a two and an half stars out of five.  

  **  Reviewed by me...as I see it~!!  **