SLOW DOWN by Lee Matthew Goldberg

This novel is sold as a tense noir in the same vein as a classic James M. Cain novel with a successful filmmaker recounting his cutthroat rise to fame by stealing his mentor’s film and wife. It had some potential but ultimately, there’s not enough there to really live up to its hype and promise. 

The characters aren’t nearly as compelling as they should be and once the lumbering plot gets going about halfway through, it proves to be barely existent beyond a maddeningly basic noir skeleton that can be summarized in a couple of sentences. The entitled asshole protagonist got on my nerves and the femme fatale was completely without nuance. And the ending…goodness, what a timid cop-out that doesn’t at all stand up to the stories that it professes to be influenced by. 

GRADE: D