This was my first buddy read of 2019 with my wonderful friend Ali @ The Sunday Feeling! Make sure you visit her blog to show her version of this post some love too!
We decided to pick this one up based on the eerie cover art plus it has a really good average rating on Goodreads. I can see why there are so many fantastic reviews for this one, however, I personally didn’t enjoy this one as much as I had originally hoped.
Most of the way through, the pace of this book was excellent at keeping me entertained and wanting to know more. It moved quickly while not actually spanning a large amount of time. I liked the fact it was based over around 36 hours as the author managed to fit in a lot in that time. I really enjoyed the pacing of this up until the ending. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t by any means a slow book, but it also didn’t rush me anywhere. The ending, on the other hand, felt extremely rushed, and this was something Ali noted too, so it wasn’t me just being fussy! The conclusion rushes past so quickly that the author actually forgets to tell you the motive of the kidnapping and the history of the person who’s responsible. The person we meet seems like they could have been a very intense and interesting character to learn about but we don’t get a chance to know them before the story is wrapped up.
In terms of the story in this one, it’s really nothing special compared to other police procedurals. It’s very generic and cliche – young girl gets kidnapped, the family are prominent in society, turns out the young girl had some secrets she was keeping, rookie female detective pushes hard on the case because she needs to prove herself – you know, the same old story you’ve seen a million times before. I can’t really say that the actual plot thrilled me, but it’s an easy kind of story to digest so I got through it quickly!
The biggest downfall with this book, for me, was the characters, I didn’t like them, especially not our main character Keri, which is never a good sign. She’s one of those cliché detectives with her own traumatising backstory – her one specifically being that her child was abducted – so you can just imagine how seriously she takes this case of a missing child. The problem with Keri, other than being penned the same as pretty much every other female detective, is simply that she’s an awful person. I can empathise with her to an extent, but she’s rude and violent. In fact, she’s a criminal! She breaks into people’s properties without warning or warrants and she physically attacks suspects.
Her partner Ray was equally cliché and turned a blind eye on his partner’s criminal activities. As for “bad cop” Hillman, who is their superior, usually, I hate these characters because all they care about is protecting themselves and they want to ‘one-up’ the rookie cop. However, this time I felt like Hillman actually spoke some sense and Keri simply disobeyed him just because she had a bee in her bonnet. He tries to suspend her because she physically assaults an underage suspect and she makes it out like he’s doing it because she’s a new detective and a woman. Does my head in.
I know this is a self-published novel, but there were several grammatical and sentence errors that were quite striking that should have easily been picked up by a proof-reader. For example, in one section, Pierce is talking about Keri and then in the next sentence calls her Ashley, and then goes back to Keri. Another thing that got on my nerves was the repetition. Every time we met the tech guy Edgerton, which was about 3 or 4 times, we were told “he’s the tech guy”. Yeah, I got it the first time! There was also a few pages where the same sentence was used twice… literally the same sentence. I can’t remember exactly but the first one I noticed was the use of “she huffed out a big breath” (or something similar to that) which was written once, then there was a small conversation, and then it was used again.
Overall, this was enjoyable enough to finish and I got through it thanks to its fast pacing but there were several issues I had with it which means I won’t be continuing the series. I really don’t want to get to know Keri any more than I already have, even the mystery of the kidnapping of her daughter isn’t enough to keep me interested.