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Sara Spooner #1
Where Shadows Fall
When her college student son dies, the twelfth victim in what seems to be a series of suicides, Sarah Spooner becomes determined to root out the shadowy secrets that hide the truth behind the student deaths.
352 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 17, 2023
Where Shadows Fall is an absolute mess of a book and a horribly written mystery.
The first chapter is the main character, Sarah, taking a jog so that the author can info dump about her and her husband's jobs as well as introduce a side character which all has very little to do with the actual story-- seriously if you axed Pat's character and started the story at the end of the first chapter where Sarah learns of her son's death, the overall plot would not be changed in the slightest. Pat's character is literally just there to remind you that Sarah is allegedly a very good DA (we'll get to that in a bit).
If you've persevered past the first chapter, you have to push through two more chapters of basically nothing happening for a period of time that's apparently supposed to be a month? I'm guessing because later in the story Sarah mentions she's had a rough month, you wouldn't otherwise be able to tell based on the writing of chapters two and three.
Also there's a weird amount of focus spent on describing breasts in this book? In the first chapter when she's jogging, the author describes the sweat trickling down her chest as "...licked the sensitive crevice between my breasts."
As someone with breasts I've never found that to be a particularly sensitive area and when exercising at most it just becomes itchy and unpleasant from the sweat.
In the following chapter, the author also describes in quite vivid detail the breasts of her daughter's friend as being "little lemon-sized breasts" as well as adding that this teenage girl has "a bottom like twin parkerhouse rolls."
Later she describes her daughter and her daughter's friend, Clare, as "scheming to increase their sex appeal," and all this is to say I had to actually look up to see if this author was a cis man because that's the quality of writing we're dealing with here. It's pretty bad.
When Sarah finally decides to progress the plot in chapter four, most of the chapter is dedicated to a man named Dominic talking at her in PARAGRAPHS of dialogue with a fun side of Sarah being super judgemental of the fact that he's fat. (Judith also has a habit of writing dialogue without any indication of who's speaking so sometimes you've gotta do a little detective work to find out who's saying what. Fun! Exactly what I'm looking for in a book that's sometimes pages of just dialogue)
Then the author spends the next chapter pussyfooting around getting to the plot some more and it becomes apparent rather quickly that the author doesn't know how to write a mystery story because the driving force of the narrative, the "mystery" of the son's death, isn't actually the real mystery.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with a mystery starting out as one thing and then ballooning out into a conspiracy-- however the REAL mystery of this particular story feels heavy handed and forced as the initial mystery is fairly apparent in its answer and our protagonists is barely motivated in seeking out the answer for that.
In conjunction with that previous point, the writing is all over the place. Half the chapters are taken up by our "heroine" spending her days in a depressed malaise and the remainder of that is spent mostly describing in cartoonish detail the caricature of a fat person, Dominic, eating food.
There is also a random b-plot happening that's really poorly executed in an attempt to make the story more interesting than it is, which is her husband cheating on her after she's been gone only a couple days. It's really contrived and adds nothing to the plot.
Speaking of plot, when plot does happen, it's at a crawl, spread thinly across multiple chapters with very little suspense to keep readers engaged.
The world the author has constructed around her character is downright improbable.
For example, there's one scene in particular where a veterinarian school is loading biohazardous waste into a truck and the man doing it wolf whistles at her and "waved a bloody dog's leg in greeting."
This is completely unrelated to the plot, just a bit of random flavor text, however I'm going to go out on a limb (pun intended) here and say that even in the late 80s bio waste disposal was a thing and you would not just have someone handling animal parts in this manner-- they would most likely be bagged in biohazard trash bags and therefore not visible. Germ theory of disease was quite well accepted at the time this was written.
More evidence that the author's world doesn't make any sense is her main character's job.
Allegedly, Sarah Spooner is a very good defense attorney working for a law firm that specifically deals with rape and molestation cases. However, I find it a bit difficult to believe considering Sarah decides to stay with a random man she's never met before and in the final chapters of the book it is glaringly obvious she's suffering symptoms of having been drugged and yet, despite multiple opportunities, she never seeks medical intervention and it doesn't even occur to her that her strange symptoms might be a sign someone's slipping her something-- at this point in the story she's also isolated from any other connections and the innkeeper has begun acting unusual and invading her privacy.
As if the descriptions of women and Dominic's eating habits aren't bad enough, every now and again the author will attempt to insert some sexy imagery but they're just downright horrible to read.
I don't know what the author was thinking but "fleshy jigsaw puzzle" is one of the worst combinations of words I've ever seen, and the sentence "they would appear in my mind's eye grunting and slurping and hyperventilating at each other," is horrendous.
If you're hyperventilating during sex, something is wrong.
The book also commits the sin in mystery writing where new information is introduced in the the last section of the book so that none of the previous clues ("clues" because they're so glaringly obvious it's insulting) are of any use in tying the story together because god forbid the reader figure out the mystery before the author meanders her way to spelling it out for you.
And let's talk about Sarah for a second. She is so incredibly unlikeable as a main character-- which can work in a story (for example Victor Frankenstein from Frankenstein or Humbert from Lolita), but this isn't one of those stories. It's very obvious that the author wants Sarah Spooner to be a sympathetic and likable heroine for her readers.
Unfortunately for Sarah Spooner, the book is written in first person and so the audience has a front row seat into her mind and boy oh boy what a mind it is. She seems to have an opinion on just about everyone and rarely ever is it a positive one. Genuinely I think the only really positive opinion she has on a character are her children.
Outside of that, everyone's fair game.
The big reveal at the end is lazy, the author lays out a red herring and then with no other hints comes up with a completely different villain who is a caricature of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder) and he is defeated by Sarah throwing him into the gorge like her son taught her to throw a skipping stone.
There's video evidence that they're able use proving that guy killed a bunch of students but none of the video shows Nick, leaving his death just as much of a mystery as it started out as. But hey, that's okay, because Sarah is just fine with that answer.
In conclusion, if you're looking for an interesting mystery novel with depth and an engaging story, this is not the book for you. The ending is hardly worth slogging through 281 pages to get to and I sincerely hope you haven't paid any money to read this book. If you have, I hope you kept the receipt because you should return it and spend your time on better pursuits.
If I could give this book a lower rating than one star, I would. There is nothing about this book that compels me to investigate the second one in the series and the fact that this was ever published is nothing short of incredible.
The first chapter is the main character, Sarah, taking a jog so that the author can info dump about her and her husband's jobs as well as introduce a side character which all has very little to do with the actual story-- seriously if you axed Pat's character and started the story at the end of the first chapter where Sarah learns of her son's death, the overall plot would not be changed in the slightest. Pat's character is literally just there to remind you that Sarah is allegedly a very good DA (we'll get to that in a bit).
If you've persevered past the first chapter, you have to push through two more chapters of basically nothing happening for a period of time that's apparently supposed to be a month? I'm guessing because later in the story Sarah mentions she's had a rough month, you wouldn't otherwise be able to tell based on the writing of chapters two and three.
Also there's a weird amount of focus spent on describing breasts in this book? In the first chapter when she's jogging, the author describes the sweat trickling down her chest as "...licked the sensitive crevice between my breasts."
As someone with breasts I've never found that to be a particularly sensitive area and when exercising at most it just becomes itchy and unpleasant from the sweat.
In the following chapter, the author also describes in quite vivid detail the breasts of her daughter's friend as being "little lemon-sized breasts" as well as adding that this teenage girl has "a bottom like twin parkerhouse rolls."
Later she describes her daughter and her daughter's friend, Clare, as "scheming to increase their sex appeal," and all this is to say I had to actually look up to see if this author was a cis man because that's the quality of writing we're dealing with here. It's pretty bad.
When Sarah finally decides to progress the plot in chapter four, most of the chapter is dedicated to a man named Dominic talking at her in PARAGRAPHS of dialogue with a fun side of Sarah being super judgemental of the fact that he's fat. (Judith also has a habit of writing dialogue without any indication of who's speaking so sometimes you've gotta do a little detective work to find out who's saying what. Fun! Exactly what I'm looking for in a book that's sometimes pages of just dialogue)
Then the author spends the next chapter pussyfooting around getting to the plot some more and it becomes apparent rather quickly that the author doesn't know how to write a mystery story because the driving force of the narrative, the "mystery" of the son's death, isn't actually the real mystery.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with a mystery starting out as one thing and then ballooning out into a conspiracy-- however the REAL mystery of this particular story feels heavy handed and forced as the initial mystery is fairly apparent in its answer and our protagonists is barely motivated in seeking out the answer for that.
In conjunction with that previous point, the writing is all over the place. Half the chapters are taken up by our "heroine" spending her days in a depressed malaise and the remainder of that is spent mostly describing in cartoonish detail the caricature of a fat person, Dominic, eating food.
There is also a random b-plot happening that's really poorly executed in an attempt to make the story more interesting than it is, which is her husband cheating on her after she's been gone only a couple days. It's really contrived and adds nothing to the plot.
Speaking of plot, when plot does happen, it's at a crawl, spread thinly across multiple chapters with very little suspense to keep readers engaged.
The world the author has constructed around her character is downright improbable.
For example, there's one scene in particular where a veterinarian school is loading biohazardous waste into a truck and the man doing it wolf whistles at her and "waved a bloody dog's leg in greeting."
This is completely unrelated to the plot, just a bit of random flavor text, however I'm going to go out on a limb (pun intended) here and say that even in the late 80s bio waste disposal was a thing and you would not just have someone handling animal parts in this manner-- they would most likely be bagged in biohazard trash bags and therefore not visible. Germ theory of disease was quite well accepted at the time this was written.
More evidence that the author's world doesn't make any sense is her main character's job.
Allegedly, Sarah Spooner is a very good defense attorney working for a law firm that specifically deals with rape and molestation cases. However, I find it a bit difficult to believe considering Sarah decides to stay with a random man she's never met before and in the final chapters of the book it is glaringly obvious she's suffering symptoms of having been drugged and yet, despite multiple opportunities, she never seeks medical intervention and it doesn't even occur to her that her strange symptoms might be a sign someone's slipping her something-- at this point in the story she's also isolated from any other connections and the innkeeper has begun acting unusual and invading her privacy.
As if the descriptions of women and Dominic's eating habits aren't bad enough, every now and again the author will attempt to insert some sexy imagery but they're just downright horrible to read.
I don't know what the author was thinking but "fleshy jigsaw puzzle" is one of the worst combinations of words I've ever seen, and the sentence "they would appear in my mind's eye grunting and slurping and hyperventilating at each other," is horrendous.
If you're hyperventilating during sex, something is wrong.
The book also commits the sin in mystery writing where new information is introduced in the the last section of the book so that none of the previous clues ("clues" because they're so glaringly obvious it's insulting) are of any use in tying the story together because god forbid the reader figure out the mystery before the author meanders her way to spelling it out for you.
And let's talk about Sarah for a second. She is so incredibly unlikeable as a main character-- which can work in a story (for example Victor Frankenstein from Frankenstein or Humbert from Lolita), but this isn't one of those stories. It's very obvious that the author wants Sarah Spooner to be a sympathetic and likable heroine for her readers.
Unfortunately for Sarah Spooner, the book is written in first person and so the audience has a front row seat into her mind and boy oh boy what a mind it is. She seems to have an opinion on just about everyone and rarely ever is it a positive one. Genuinely I think the only really positive opinion she has on a character are her children.
Outside of that, everyone's fair game.
The big reveal at the end is lazy, the author lays out a red herring and then with no other hints comes up with a completely different villain who is a caricature of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder) and he is defeated by Sarah throwing him into the gorge like her son taught her to throw a skipping stone.
There's video evidence that they're able use proving that guy killed a bunch of students but none of the video shows Nick, leaving his death just as much of a mystery as it started out as. But hey, that's okay, because Sarah is just fine with that answer.
In conclusion, if you're looking for an interesting mystery novel with depth and an engaging story, this is not the book for you. The ending is hardly worth slogging through 281 pages to get to and I sincerely hope you haven't paid any money to read this book. If you have, I hope you kept the receipt because you should return it and spend your time on better pursuits.
If I could give this book a lower rating than one star, I would. There is nothing about this book that compels me to investigate the second one in the series and the fact that this was ever published is nothing short of incredible.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 24, 2025
Decently written, but the protagonist showed a couple of instances of really amazing stupidity which took me out of the story for a bit. Easy to guess the villain at that point. But still a fun, easy read.
June 16, 2019
I liked it, but I thought it was a little slow in the middle. The end was unexpected and exciting.
May 15, 2020
Slow start with a quick end. Still struggling with the Diamond character, just don't understand all the fascination with his eating habits. Overall, not a bad read.
April 17, 2016
When faced with the loss of a loved one, people would make an effort to move on. However, for Sarah Spooner, she chose to look deeper into her son's suicide as she could not shake off the feeling that something was wrong with the whole situation. Her son Nicholas looked normal the last time they spoke and did not show any signs of unhappiness. As Sarah investigated further, she found out that Nicky's death was just one of the many unfortunate cases that occurred at Cromwell University. Intrigued by the series of events, she finds out the truth, aided by his new-found graphologist friend who uncovered the secret of the school.
The book was packed with so much mystery and the story was told well enough that I only managed to put the book down when my eyes just couldn't take any more reading. The author surely knows how to paint a picture into the readers' minds. My favorite parts were when the protagonist goes to a restaurant with her friend and the meals were described so well, I could almost taste the food. Emoticón smile
The book was packed with so much mystery and the story was told well enough that I only managed to put the book down when my eyes just couldn't take any more reading. The author surely knows how to paint a picture into the readers' minds. My favorite parts were when the protagonist goes to a restaurant with her friend and the meals were described so well, I could almost taste the food. Emoticón smile
Read
May 6, 2010I didn't really get into this book until the main character headed to Cromwell, a college town based on Cornell University. From that point on, it was pretty much your run-of-the-mill suspense novel, but as a Cornell alum I was continually entertained by the various ways that Cornell things got renamed (Isaiah Cromwell instead of Ezra Cornell, Campusville instead of Collegetown, and so forth). It was a bit weird to read this during a year when Cornell has had more than its usual number of gorge-related deaths (and I do think that Beth Saulnier's Reliable Sources is a more interesting book on a similar topic).
January 3, 2015
Don't really know how I felt about this book. I read other reviews where Diamond annoyed them. But I actually quite liked him. Much more than Sarah. And her pathetic husband Ben. I did manage to feel sorry for Sarah and having to deal with the death of her son. Turns our she didn't know him as well as she thought. Wonder if that is true of all parents and their children?
This was a quick read and a gift for
Christmas from my hubby. If anything, it did keep me wondering about the tale of Crimwell straight through to the ending.
This was a quick read and a gift for
Christmas from my hubby. If anything, it did keep me wondering about the tale of Crimwell straight through to the ending.
March 15, 2010
This was a strange book. The setting, a college named Cromwell, seems to have been a disguise of Cornell, with Serenity Falls standing in for Seneca Falls. Sarah and Ben Spooner's son has killed himself by jumping into a gorge. She flies there to find out more, and meets a strange giant of a man who gives her advice and rides, etc. She is very fixed on finding out just why the son did it, and persists past the point of caution.
July 24, 2014
I liked this one, I kept coming back to it, but it seemed to drag -- I got frustrated with the description of Mr. Diamond's eating habits, I think that the author put too much emphasis on a side story, and not enough on the central Spooner family. And the introduction of the villain and the police chief's attitude just seemed to come out of nowhere.
May 3, 2008
This Kelman novel has started out very well, and i'm 50 pages in. It's much better than the one I attempted to read yesterday.
July 20, 2012
Read this at the beach after I found it on a dusty shelf. Not my cup of tea...
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews