4 Books that didn't make the cut

I picked up four books from the bargain bin the other day, and they all turned out to be turkeys. I only got a couple of chapters into each one before I gave up on them.

• A Spot Of Bother by Mark Haddon. Slow moving story of family life told from the point of view of an old man suffering from anxiety, among other problems. National Bestseller. Did I say slow moving? Make that glacial.
• A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth. The blurb on the back makes it sound like it might be an interesting story, and it might be, eventually, but it takes way too long to start going somewhere. The background is just endless.
• Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. It might be a pretty good story, but I'll never know. It's written in some kind of phonetically spelled slang/dialect. It was an effort to figure out what each sentence meant. Some of them were easy enough, but some of the "words" were totally opaque. Too much work to translate.
• Tour de Force by Philip Cleife, A Harper Novel of Suspense. It could have been a good story, except for the implausible behavior of the lead characters. Most of it is pretty good, but then something happens, or someone says something, and I just throw up my hands in disgust. Once or twice would be okay, but it kept happening over and over again.