Book Review: Pipsqueak by Brian M Wiprud

Stars: 2 out of 5

Pros: Fun climax

Cons: Just about everything that led up to it.

The Bottom Line: 

A few fun moments

Surrounded by a poor plot

And flat characters

Not Quite the Comic Caper I Expected

While looking for a new author earlier this year, I stumbled upon Brian M. Wiprud and his first novel, Pipsqueak.  The cover features a squirrel driving a convertible, and it sounded like a fun comic caper, so I decided to give the book a chance.  I should have just passed.

Garth Carson makes his living via taxidermy, preserving animals and then renting them out for shoots or other events.  Always looking for new animals or parts for the ones he has, he stops in at a second hand store and makes the find of his career on the shelf behind him.  It's Pipsqueak, the stuffed squirrel puppet from a TV show from his childhood.  Eagerly, he hopes to buy it, but the owner won't sell.  Garth steps in the back of the store for a moment only to return to find the owner and puppet gone and someone dying on the floor of the store.  The trouble follows Garth home, and he soon finds himself caught up in a conspiracy well beyond him.  Can he escape?

For a caper, I expect a mystery with some wild, out of control elements in a fast paced plot.  It's still light enough to not be a thriller, but the plot should move forward somewhat.  The plot here moved forward very slowly for way too long.  Yes, stuff was happening, but there's a difference between action and plot development, and the author doesn't seem to have that down.  I did find the climax entertaining and exciting enough.  If the whole book had been like that, I would have been fine.  Plus there's the fact that the plot went from wild to stretching credibility to an extreme with its conspiracy theories before the end, although I did find myself buying into the premise for the climax.

The book is filled with supposedly wacky characters.  I, however, did not find them that funny.  I can remember smiling twice over the course of the book.  Never once did I laugh or chuckle or any other sign of amusement.  The story was just too flat to be funny.  Even Garth's first person observations on things weren't that amusing.

Then we've got the characters.  Outside of Garth, his girlfriend, and his sidekick, I had a very hard time keeping all the characters straight.  There were too many of them and they weren't really distinguishable from one another.  This became a problem late in the book when I had to flip back through to remember who the various characters were.

The writing is fine for the most part.  But for some reason, the author decided to go with extreme accents for a couple of the characters.  They are poorly executed, however, making their dialog almost impossible to decipher.  I actually gave up on one character and skipped his lines.

The climax raised my appreciation of the book, but it still wasn't enough to recommend it.  Pipsqueak is a debut to avoid.