Plugged - Eoin Colfer

Ali Mark
Jan 5, 2016
4 min read

Published in 2011.

Pages: 254

Number of books by author: 30 Novels

Genre: Fiction

When Daniel goes to work tonight, he has no idea that he will be put in the middle of one-of-two wars. The war he starts? Leads to a murder. The second war he is an innocent by-stander; but how does the bitchy upstairs neighbor, two detectives, and the head mobster of Jersey fit into some vigilante justice? Only Daniel really pieces the puzzle together.

You may like this book if you like the following sub-genres:

Military/War
Police/FBI/Detectives
Murder
Organized Crime
Vigilante Justice

Goodreads users gave this book a 3.37. I think it was more deserving of a 3.50.

Pros: Let me start by saying this is something I wouldn't normally read - mafia stories don't really feel up my alley, and as I dug into the first few chapters, I was met with a past of war... which is definitely not my thing. However, I kept trudging through and once I got into the fourth chapter, things heated up. The story line was based on simple curiosity - "Who did what," "How did that happen," type of curiosity - not just the basic, "what's going to happen next," but a firm stance in wondering who was responsibility for what crisis of the day, because if it wasn't for the lack of knowledge, the lack of answers (and some still left unspoken), I wouldn't have made it through this book.

But on top of the fine art of curiosity, the writing was honest. I didn't feel as if the Irish-gibberish here-or-there was forced or made up (and it wasn't until I got to the end of the book that I found the author to be from Ireland). Which also made me feel as if the author had some actual interest in how mob-hits and dirty-cops worked, because it never felt over-played or fake. I live in the suburbs... and as far as I know, there's no mafia crime in my neighborhood (although, dirty cops surely exist everywhere, I'm betting they are housed in the higher-violent-crime areas) - so it was nice to feel as if the author knew what he was talking about.

And while the cover is confusing (stating it's the author of Screwed as well), I found through Goodreads that there are 30 other editions of this book, which finally led me to the understanding that Screwed is a continuum of Plugged, and I have added it to my list - because based on how this one ended (with more questions than answers, although well enough to stand on its own and give you that feeling of mystery that comes with the mob and dirty cops), I want to venture down the path with Daniel to see what he's going to do with his new life.

Cons: This certainly wasn't Colfer's first book, but in a lot of ways, the writing frustrated me in some places. Daniel was in the war, so we get a lot of reflections (or flashbacks is more-or-less what I would call them) but they take over the story in strange places. In places where you would know that the conversation taking place or the actions taking place would only take up, 25 seconds, yet, the flashback seems to take minutes of time. It just felt pushed in and I wish they would've been either separated before the story itself as a prologue, or better divided into the story. Some of them felt unnecessary; however, I may be judgmental because I thought majority of the first three and a half chapters were mostly worthless, just giving background that yet again, could've been better written in different parts of the book as flashbacks, since the author seems to like this tactic.

The character count, and I kept a steady tally to really identify if it would be crucial to include names in my above summary - and there were 13 characters (excluding the POV character, Daniel/Dan). Of those 13 characters, 8 of those characters that I can remember specifically had a secondary name they went by. And we include two of the detectives, you could probably increase that to 10. So you have 10 characters with 2 names or more. I felt the ridiculous number of nicknames (some of which you had to piece together on your own) was such a nuisance to the story. I would've preferred Victor just being Vic, or Victor.... or Jason not also being Jase. It was just overwhelming to keep track of who did what to who, and who's nickname belongs to who - a few times throughout, I had to go back a bit and see if I was remembering the correct character in the correct place (keep in mind, we had some flashbacks from the army, and then some flashbacks to earlier pages in the present day as well).

Had these two things not been such a large part of the book, I could've easily handed this a 4-star rating. Even if only one of these issues was present, I think it could've even gone as high as a 4.5 star. I hope when I dig into Screwed that I'm not met with 35 pages of nonsense, and 20-this-or-that characters.