SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
The big plothole is of course the effects of a reset button. To know for sure if Oswald was the killer, Jake could have killed Oswald in 1958, gone back to 2011 to see if Kennedy survived or not. If he hadn't, Oswald would not have been the killer, and he would have had to go back to 1958 which would have reset Oswald into life again. That might even have prevented him from becoming a patsy, saving Oswalds life. And then he would have had to wait for the real killers to show up.
This doesn't get mentioned a lot by reviewers, only some boards discuss this like the Guardian and Reddit.
Preventing the attack would have been easy with a modern fake IED, (to spook the Secret Service) that would explode BEFORE Dealy Plaza, at a point where the motor cade could still turn.
But sure, then we wouldn't have a 800 page novel, so I guess that's motivation to ignore the plothole right there.
Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good novel, even if it was a little saccharine at times. Especially when it came to small towns.
[blockquote]It's noted in the book that Jake couldn't kill Oswald outright until he knew he was acting on his own. If he had killed Oswald early, and he was part of a group, they could have just used another killer.[/blockquote]
Don't see how that changes anything. The reset is still in effect. Plus, King offers us a binary choice: it's either Oswald or a "conspiracy" which King tries to ridicule.
Lets say JFK still gets murdered, then we know that all detective work should look at other people, not Oswald. But King is a bit lazy to fully work out alternatives, perhaps because there is a ton of material on every little move Oswald made, but not on alternatives.
