MISSING KEY

by Aaron Kinney
MISSING KEY – Book Review

Some novels are masterpieces, destined to be discussed and debated for decades. Missing Key is a book.
All right, that was cruel. In its defense, Missing Key has a decent enough premise. It’s got black ops teams and a man on the run, Bourne-style, from the handler who wrongly burned him. Properly executed, it could have been an engaging, if not compelling thriller.
But it’s a huge misfire. Missing Key’s plot is slow and poorly paced, its characters shallow and ill-defined, its twists predictable and contrived. Telling a story in the loosest sense, it moves its characters from scene to scene without allowing them to develop. It goes through the motions, never challenging itself.
Missing Key follows two connected stories set decades apart. The first involves a wanted man named Billy, who establishes the Nowhere Tiki Bar (which later becomes quasi-relevant) on a hidden tropical paradise. The second follows Michael, Jennifer and Alex, who’ve been drawn into a conspiracy involving Navy black ops and Caribbean drug cartels.
You can be forgiven for being interested based on the concept, but while Missing Key has a solid premise, almost every aspect of the execution went wrong. Very little happens during the first half of the book, besides a lot of needless exposition. Michael and Jennifer talk, drink, eat oysters and talk some more while the story drags along, until Alex arrives halfway through and the main plot is finally revealed.
By then it’s too late—damage done. Almost nothing has happened, and the flat dialogue and prose have not sweetened it.
A scene in which a character learns that he’s been betrayed is robbed of meaning when he barely reacts. The characters seem unaffected by much of what happens around them—they acknowledge events, but they never react. We know that they’re aware of things, but not how they’re affected.
The soulless dialogue doesn’t help us to empathize. It reads like a Star Wars prequel script, where characters’ words and actions never feel organic. The already weak expository dialogue feels even more stilted and awkward when characters blurt out crucial details, not because it’s natural, but because it will force the plot to move forward.
After reading Missing Key, I feel like I’ve learned nothing about its characters. I couldn’t tell you much about Alex’s personality or Jennifer’s past. Not knowing the characters, it was difficult to root for them for any reason besides, “They’re the good guys.”
With a little more editing, Missing Key could have been an engaging thriller, but it reads like a first draft. You can do worse than author Scott Musial’s first novel, but it’s hard to recommend Missing Key when you can get a comparable, if not superior experience elsewhere.