Title: The Death Of Danny Daggers
Author: Haydn Wilks
Genre: Mystery, Crime
First published: May 1st 2015
Finished reading: June 11th 2015
Pages: 236
“Ji Eun sat and sifted through the nuggets of Rory’s narrative that she’d been able to understand, trying to piece them together into some coherent whole.”
*** A copy of this book was kindly provided to me in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! ***
I was really looking forward to this read, especially since I haven’t been reading enough good crime novels lately. The Death Of Danny Daggers sounded like an intriguing mystery with various storylines and a multi-cultural angle. I guess I did like the general idea of the story, but I was put off by the overwhelming amount of swearing used during most of the story. I don’t mind swearing as long as it adds to the story, but I don’t think this is the case in The Death Of Danny Daggers. The fact that I had difficulties understanding about half of the dialogues because of the Scottish/Welsh dialects didn’t really help either. I’m a philologist and I normally love dialects in stories, but in this case it was truly to hard to understand for those who are not familiar with the Scottish and Welsh dialects. This made it hard to read the novel and it took away a lot of my reading pleasure. That said, I did like the fact that as a reader you only slowly find out what happened to Danny during the last days of his life. The way Haydn Wilks is able to connect the different storylines and main characters is also interesting. But I don’t think I would recommend this one, unless you don’t mind excessive swearing and are familiar with the Scottish/Welsh dialects.
Danny Daggers is a student who loves to do stunts and it has made him quite popular on YouTube. What he doesn’t know is that he is about to be in mayor trouble… As he is about to take on more drugs, alcohol and excitement than he can take. We read about his last days and also learn more about the characters that will play a role in those. Ji Eun, a Korean student that is doing work experience and is currently working with a veteran journalist Rory Galagher… The Amstell brothers always looking for more trouble and one of them just escaped from prison… Tom and Joseph working at a call centre and not quite enjoying it… All those stories soon collide and things are about to get really messy.
I’m a sucker for a good mystery/crime read, so when I was asked to read and review The Death Of Danny Daggers I immediately said yes. Unfortunately, what sounded like a really promising story turned out to be something I just couldn’t enjoy. The excessive swearing and difficult to understand dialects took away a lot of my reading pleasure and it took me a lot longer than planned to finish this novel. I normally don’t mind violence, swearing, drugs etc, but I don’t think its use was justified in this case. I still like the general idea of the story, but IÂ guess I would have preferred a ‘milder’ version of the dialogue.
It's All About Books 