Poison at the Pinnacle
Hawk MacKinney

Review by Denise Kresge

Poison at the Pinnacle is about a detective - the independently wealthy, handsome, ex-Navy SEAL Craige Ingramme — who stumbles across a serial killer and an embezzlement plot while trying to solve the mysterious death of a bank CEO. MacKinney attempts to deliver a hard-boiled detective novel with an ex-military protagonist, similar to the novels of Robert Crais or Lee Child.

There are two reasons why MacKinney fails at the attempt: a lack of basic grammar and a lack of basic writing skills.

MacKinney does not have a good grasp of basic grammar, making numerous errors in case, tense, and with pronoun usage. This is exacerbated by punctuation errors: quotes in wrong places, incorrect paragraph breaks. It is obvious that MacKinney started writing his character of Craige Ingramme in the first person but then later changed to third. But he didn't correct all the "I", "me" and "mine" references; nor did he correct the verbs.

MacKinney still needs to learn much of the craft of writing. The plot is muddled, even once you work through the numerous grammar mistakes. He attempts to use flashbacks and reminiscing as methods of giving backstory, but he's not deft enough at mixing past and present in the same paragraph, so the plot just gets murkier. The story shifts point of view with every new character, and often has multiple points of view in the same paragraph. The plot twist at the end has no basis in the rest of the story; it's meant to be clever, but your reaction is just "huh?" MacKinney's writing style was either terse sentences or florid, overwrought metaphors on par with a very bad romance novel.

There was little research done on the life of a private investigator or the psychology of serial killers. As far as can be determined, Barry the serial killer just woke up one day and decided to murder people. Ingramme the PI did little to warrant the statements that other characters made on how skilled he was. MacKinney often summarized the details of being a PI with sentence similar to "after much footwork." And he used Ingramme's hunches as a form of deus ex machina.

MacKinney needs to take some refresher courses on grammar and creative writing before his next novel.

Xlibris Corporation , 2003: ISBN 140109192X