Back to...
or...
Synopsis:
Essentially two 'episodes' stuck together. In the first, Sam leaps into some poncey ghost hunter (hence the first half of the title) trying to contact this woman's dead husband. In the second he leaps into a private detective in the fifties trying to find his partner's killer (hence the second).
Review:
Crap. This alternatively irritated or bored the hell out of me. The first half's a reasonably OK, fairly poor, but mildly entertaining story. The girl's annoying (she's an artist in the worst sense of the word, she's a complete wuss, and she can't bear the thought that her beloved husband is gone forever...), but the story holds together nicely, and managed to keep at least my interest.
The second half was where things went very very bad. For a start, it was written in a psudo-Raymond Chandler style (The whole book was written in first person, which didn't help. For one thing, who the hell was the story being told to? It wasn't anything like an internal monologue, it's not as if Sam can keep a diary, and the only other constant is Al (who seemed to be surprisingly absent for most of this book, and when he did show up he wasn't very helpful. Not that he's ever very helpful, but he usually makes more of an effort than this), who is unlikely to hang around and listen for very long). It tried to be all post-modern and take the piss out of itself for this. It didn't work. The story was laughable and seemed to centre around Sam lusting after his host's partner's widow. She is described as something approaching Jessica Rabbit, and spends the whole time hanging around in pretty dresses (black, naturally, as her husband's just been brutally murdered), saying things like "I can't believe I could turn him on so much without even noticing." Now, while I accept that Sam Beckett is a red-blooded male (presumably straight. He's got off with enough women) who is likely to notice an attractive woman, he is not monumentally stupid, and is therefore not likely to discount her as completely incapable of any kind of wrongdoing, just because he likes her legs.
Another ludicrous point about the second story, the guy that Sam leapt into looked exactly like Humphrey Bogart. How wacky is that! Also, Woody Allen did a 'cameo' (Aged ten, or thereabouts). And, guess what? He was still neurotic as a tiny child. Isn't that funny?
As I briefly mentioned earlier, characterisation was a bit off. Sam kept getting terribly offended by Al's 'sleazey' stories, except that he rarely let him get more than half a sentence in, and the half sentences always seemed quite innocuous to me. Not to mention that they barely spent ten minutes in the same room (well, not really the same room... you know what I mean) for both stories put together... That was always the best bit of watching Quantum Leap, the Sam/Al dialogue/friendly bitching.
And (spoiler alert!) the ending. It's easy to prevent the reader guessing who the real villian is, if you only give them one, entirely irrelevant, line before the whole dramatic shootout at the end.
In conclusion - not with a bargepole, man.
or...