The Dispatcher is about a police dispatcher who’s young daughter is abducted from her bedroom while she sleeps.  Many years later after being presumed dead, while on shift he gets a call from a girl claiming to be her.  He sets off on a new investigation to find her.

The Dispatcher has a pretty strong basic plot. The story of a man who’s trying to get his daughter, and really his life, back is a powerful premise that it’s easy to empathize with.  But I found myself struggling to connect with this particular book.

When I say that I was struggling I mean that I never got that super engrossed feeling you often get when you’re reading.  I mean for me that’s the whole point of a book.  You get sucked into the world and taken there.  It’s as if the words inject straight into your brain without the filters that various screens provide because you’re really making up a lot of your own imagery.  But I couldn’t get there with this particular book.  It just wouldn’t come to life for me.

The words are all there, but it doesn’t feel like there’s any magic behind them.  It feels like this book is trying too hard to be a gritty crime thriller packed with violence.  It’s trying hard to be Tarantino or the literary equivalent.   But just typing out brutality isn’t enough to make something brutal.

I don’t mean to make this sound like it’s a horrible book.  Not at all.  The Dispatcher is a perfectly decent piece of writing but I found it just not hitting the right notes.  Maybe it will for you, if you enjoy this type of book you might give it a read.

Overall this didn’t connect for me.  Your mileage may vary.