Sinister Sisterhood by Jane Badrock ( Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com )

Bad Press Ink, 2020

ISBN: 9781916084520

Available: paperback, Kindle

Sinister Sisterhood is an unfortunate example of an outstanding idea that isn’t brought to fruition, due to a number of factors.  The main problems are a lack of focus on the actual plot, and a complete disconnect with reality in the story.  This is one novel where the editor should have complimented the author on the idea, but asked for a total re-write.

The premise is excellent: a small group of women, fed up with the poaching of various species, take matters into their own hands and start eliminating big-game hunters.  It’s a very original idea, and hasn’t been done before, to the best of my knowledge.  However, too much of the time is spent filling in the backstories of the “sisterhood,” and not enough time focusing on the plot.  Example: four of the hunters, and five years’ time, are eliminated in one little paragraph.  The whole story was building up to the “thrill of the hunt”, with the sisters killing the hunters, and it’s glossed over in a few sentences.  The writing style is somewhat scattershot, and it shows up often when detailing the backstories of the characters.  The character of a cyberhacker is just dropped into the story from nowhere, and there isn’t any explanation for him until many chapters later.  Other characters get an overly long chapter detailing their entire lives right from the moment of introduction.  Add in the constant jumps through time with the chapters, and you have a story that feels like a bunch of puzzle pieces that were assembled incorrectly.  They’re the right pieces, just not in the right place.

Even if the story was streamlined better, the disconnect from reality leaves the reader finding the whole story implausible.  There’s a difference between a fiction story that has been researched enough to make it plausible, as opposed to one where the author simply invents everything.  Unfortunately, this story is the latter.  Prime example: one character decides they want to make ladies’ thongs out of bearskin, so the person goes to Colorado and hunts a large number of bears.  News flash: you can’t just go hunt bear and shoot as many as you want in the United States.  Colorado bear hunting is run on a lottery system, and hunters often wait years before they are issued a permit to TRY to hunt a bear.  There’s no guarantee that a hunter will ever get one.

The character of Chloe is the most outrageous example of pure fantasy.  This is a girl who didn’t even finish standard schooling, yet she immediately becomes an “undiscovered master chemist”.  Speaking from nine years’ chemistry experience: it doesn’t work that way.  It takes years to become proficient, and a lot of studying, yet Chloe instantly knows it all.  The silliness continues when she disposes of a body at the hotel she works at with a “portable acid bath” she keeps in the housekeeping closet.  It’s a foolish idea, to say nothing of the basic volume problem that comes with body disposal, and the fumes.  The whole book is like this, with every character an expert in something, with little to no training.  It’s like an army of pseudo-Athenas bursting from the head of Zeus.  It borders on comical, and turns what could have been a good story into a disappointing exercise in slapstick.

Readers that can completely suspend belief may find something worthwhile here, but everyone else would do well to give it a pass.  The potential is there, but the book itself needs improvement. It would be nice to see the author try a rewrite with an editor to keep the story on track, as the idea is worth using.

Contains: violence, profanity

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson