Remember back in the ’80s when LETHAL WEAPON came out and made a gazillion bucks, and all of a sudden, every other movie featured a mismatched couple of cops who bickered and quipped while tracking down the murderous bad guy? Those movies always had the same list of ingredients: 1) a flashy murder to kick off the festivities; 2) a younger, sexy cop who struggled with some personal demons (usually a tragedy in his past that prevented him from ever finding love again); 3) a damsel in distress who ends up in bed with abovementioned good-looking cop by the third act; and 4) a climactic showdown with the killer that ends with a fake-out injury to one of the good guys. Throw in a feel-good epilogue, freeze-frame on the main characters enjoying a hearty laugh, cue up the hard-rockin’ theme song and you got yourselves a movie.

Unfortunately, David Hosp remembered that buddy movie formula, because THE BETRAYED has the feel of a lost LETHAL WEAPON sequel … and that ain’t good, people.

The plot is at once simplistic and hopelessly muddled, paced like a lackluster episode of LAW & ORDER. A reporter is viciously murdered. Her spunky younger sister, law school student Sydney, starts poking around to investigate the murder and of course finds (and follows up on) leads that Riggs and Murtaugh … er, I mean Cassian and Train, the two detectives on the case, have missed. This obviously puts a target on her head, and the hired killer who murdered her sister goes after Sydney, which leads to Cassian dipping into THE BODYGUARD territory to protect her, which leads to a clumsy romantic subplot which leads to blah blah blah, dear God, just let this book end already!

Reading THE BETRAYED was the equivalent of eating a stack of saltines in the middle of the Sahara with a canteen full of dust at your side. Dry does not even begin to describe Hosp’s writing. Yes, he can put the words on the page and write grammatically correct sentences, but there’s no personality, no flair, no distinctive point of view to make it come to any semblance of life. The story just kind of plods along, as if he’s determined to go through his carefully organized outline and hit all of the points he’s plotted. There is precious little “storytelling” going on here.

Which leads me to a mini-rant about the characterization: There is none. Oh sure, there are some broad attempts to shade the characters with some dimension, but they fall flat once Hosp starts concentrating on the police procedural portion of the book. And another thing: Whose story is it? Is it Sydney’s, as she tries to snoop her way to finding her sister’s killer? Is it Cassian’s? It’s impossible to tell because Hosp takes one of the cardinal commandments of fiction writing – “Thou shalt find one point of view and stick with it” – and stomps all over it. He’s all over the map, bopping from one character to another, throwing in backstories for characters who have nothing to do with the plot as a whole, and the result is a mishmash of bad writing that even high school creative writing students would know better than to turn in to the teacher.

John Grisham’s success obviously influenced Hosp to take time out from his own busy legal career to dip his toes into the fiction pool. How he managed to sell this manuscript to a major publisher, however, is less clear to me. The writing is amateurish, the twists are predictable, the characters are thin, the plotting is weak and the ending is so murky that it takes a couple of readings to comprehend that Hosp actually got away with publishing such a piece of tripe. This one gets a boo, a hiss and a big, old “blecch” from me. Avoid it. –Rebecca Brock

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