Pros Novel Read-Along - Waiting to Fall by Rob - Chapters 16-20
This weekend's chapters were 16-20, carrying on where we left off. We're at the bit I remember reading the first time around - except that I remember it differently!*g*
This week's installment begins with Bodie being pleased that Doyle is asking around and looking into the idea of working with the B Squad when he gets married - although he would have been less pleased if he knows how little Doyle likes the idea...
This week's episode is Mixed Doubles, slipped in a very AU way into the story. The lads are off to train with Macklin, who can still easily beat Doyle. He can beat Bodie too, but only because Macklin doesn't go all out to summon Bodie's real strength - otherwise, we're told, Bodie would win. Macklin finally manages to get Doyle's killer instincts up by attacking Bodie - although of course Doyle still loses to Mackin. He also doesn't understand why Mackin went for Bodie with a knife - until Bodie explains it to him.
And then it's the Parsali op - Doyle is on edge, and irritating everyone there by prowling around checking the security. He's surprised that Bodie can take it all so calmly. In the end Doyle was right - the villains were hiding inside the house all the time, and the lads save the day.
Nor is everything ideal in the world of Ray-and-Ann in general - Ann isn't feeling well, and it turns out she might be pregnant. It also turns out that's something neither of them want, and they're both incredibly relieved when it's finally confirmed as a false alarm. Ann has been offered a promotion in America, and Doyle hasn't been pleased with the idea of being downgraded from the A Squad, and it finally looks like things are twisting back to the way they should be.
Enter Charles Holly, Ann's estranged father. It turns out that he's not entirely sane, and his task du jour is to kill Ray Doyle. Seeing Ray nipping out to the shops in his hooded jacket he seizes the moment and plants a bomb in his car - only it wasn't Doyle at all, it was Ann who'd gone out, borrowing Doyle's jacket, and she's killed immediately. Holly realises what's happened and heads back to finish the job off - he manages to catch Doyle by surprise, thinks he's killed him, and drags the body away to hide in a secret compartment behind the walls at his place. He then has a heart attack in the middle of a field - leaving Doyle to eventually come around with a broken arm and ribs, amongst other injuries, in the blackness of a confined space, entirely alone and trapped.
Of course they finally find him - and it turns out that Charles Holly was behind Doyle's original imprisonment as well as his current one. He'd planned to murder him then too, but again had killed someone else by accident - so framing Doyle was the next best thing.
Doyle recovers slowly in hospital, from being in a coma to waking up with no memory of what had happened, to being furious when he finds out that Ann has been dead for two weeks before Bodie tells him. He takes himself off, and the only person who can work out where he's gone turns out to be Cowley - giving Bodie something to think about. Bodie had, however, seen all his fellow agents mobilise to try and find Doyle, realising that they'd not given him a fair chance right from the start, so perhaps things are going to start looking up. Doyle is taken to the Beeches to convalesce, and we can only wait to see how it all works out... *g*
You can probably guess from the tone of my review what I'm going to say. Hopefully not at length, because I've said it before, but - I'm still struggling with this incompetent Doyle! Although it's not even that he's incompetent - he knew there was something wrong on the Parsali op - it's more his lack of confidence and background knowledge, which I just don't see in canon. The Doyle I see is an experienced police officer, member of the drug squad, and human being! He's confident of his own abilities and he's interested enough in other people that he can work things out. I know he's had all this knocked out of him in the story via the imprisonment, but...
And we're still getting super-Bodie in so many ways - to the point that apparently Macklin doesn't even try properly with him, because Bodie would beat him easily. No! This is Macklin! He knows tricks to trick people's tricks! He was undercover in Hong Kong, an agent himself, and he built himself back up from being smashed - he's not just some random guy! And much as I love Bodie, it's canon that he'd never been on a stake-out until... well, Stake-Out *g*
Oddly enough, I remember Doyle-trapped-in-the-wall as taking up so much more of the story, and being so much more dramatically written - I wonder why that is! I also remember Ann Holly being blown up in her car, but I thought that was in a different story entirely. How strange!
Anyway - enough from me - what did you think? *g*
And that's where we are now