This was a crackerjack of a tale. And was pretty good for a first novel.
Many thanks to the author and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Thank you for letting me give this story a try. It's really not my style of reading - there was too much silly random action, and after about 10% I noticed that I was getting easily distracted, and perhaps skimming the text. Best wishes on it's republication.

PAINLESS
by Bill Poje

This book was supplied without cost in return for an objective review. I read this in e-book format.

I was surprised to find the book was written 10 years ago.
My brief opinion: somewhere beneath all the gratuitous violence, sex,

and extreme-almost-comic machismo, there is a reasonable story of crime with Augustus Valentine as the comic book super-hero. Aug, as he likes to be called, starts life as a semi-street-wise teen who witnesses the murders of his parents and is sent to be raised by his Uncle Mark. After seeing to Aug’s education, Mark establishes him as head of an import/export company in Port Everglades, Florida. And that’s where the ‘fun’ begins. Still not fully recovered from the apparent suicide of his beloved wife Laurie, Aug becomes embroiled in a very confusing smuggling plot gone awry, involving precious metals and jewels. The plot is not the only confusing element: add a lot of repetitious dialogue, poor grammar, extensive use of the passive tense that slowed down the plot and annoyed this reader, using the word “would” far too often, a myriad of characters, ridiculous nicknames, far too many ‘cutesie’ grammatical games - just for a few examples, and you have a book that either needs a good editor or a rewrite. The alternative could be an author who is so entranced by his writing and what he believes are forays into the world of offering “something really different” in grammar tricks and games, that he has lost his focus on entertaining the reader while enjoying himself to the extreme. Bogged down in bloody mob-like violence and a plot that seems endless, this reader finally didn’t care, but finished the book to the end after losing all and any relationship with the hero and his finale.
A mouthful of a very sweet dessert can be intriguing and even good: being faced with finishing an entire plateful can be both sickening and downright annoying - even painful. What began as a rather interesting, clear-cut story ended up as confusing as a plateful of spaghetti.