What do you think?
Rate this book
Murder at the Grands
The newest stories on the author's New Hampshire Hotels mystery series. This book features a full length novel and a novella. The novel, set at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, N.H., is titled "I Knew You When." The novella, "Murder With a View" takes place at the Mountain View Grand in Whitefield, N.H. In both stories, the primary character is Okrant's sleuth, former crime reporter-turned-professor Kary Turnell.
276 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2014
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 10, 2021
I wanted to like this book. I really did. While I finished the short novel, I did not finish the included short story.
Judging by the cover, it ticks all the right boxes for me. Local author, local setting, and published by the same publisher who put out the anthology with my first ever story sale, and a couple of other anthologies I've been included in since. Also, I found my copy while going through my grandparents' things, and it may have been one of the last books my grandfather was reading when he passed.
The plot was good. A professor, his sister-in-law, and the hotel security chief investigate the death of the SiL's friend, which might be (of course it is) murder or might be an accident.
Sadly, it just went downhill from there.
Its not so much a case of "showing vs telling", but rather, we get both. There are several chapters (many of which are less than 2 pages) where there's half a page of exposition about someone's backstory, and the rest of the chapter is the characters discussing said backstory, reiterating the exact same information.
Instead of sticking to a single POV, we get bounced around through not just these three characters, but the victim, the killer, and a few side characters as well. None of them have enough of a distinctive voice to stand out from one another, which is made all the more confusing when we start a paragraph in one POV and finish in another.
The hand of the author is everywhere.
Characters stop investigating something because they decide they're hungry or feel the need to go meet up with someone or whatever. One character hears footsteps and door close in what is supposed to be an occupied portion of the hotel, while looking for a strange person, but instead of taking look, goes to find someone else and tell them about hearing the noise while they have dinner in the hotel dining room.
A hotel employee has the answers they need to complete the investigation, but rather than getting the info, the hotel security chief doesn't put up a fight when the informant's boss demands they get back to work. This novel could've been 50-75 pages shorter the characters had acted like people actively investigating a possible murder with the killer still in the area.
Characters interview someone else with potentially useful info, then talk with him again 20ish pages later, and seem to have forgotten who he is and his relationship with others involved in the case.
The killer and the red herring are painfully obvious as to what their role in the story is, not to mention that the killer is more or less given away by the title.
All in all, except for the length (250 or pages), _I Knew You When_ is on par with much of the work I've read in collegiate intro to fiction writing classes.
Judging by the cover, it ticks all the right boxes for me. Local author, local setting, and published by the same publisher who put out the anthology with my first ever story sale, and a couple of other anthologies I've been included in since. Also, I found my copy while going through my grandparents' things, and it may have been one of the last books my grandfather was reading when he passed.
The plot was good. A professor, his sister-in-law, and the hotel security chief investigate the death of the SiL's friend, which might be (of course it is) murder or might be an accident.
Sadly, it just went downhill from there.
Its not so much a case of "showing vs telling", but rather, we get both. There are several chapters (many of which are less than 2 pages) where there's half a page of exposition about someone's backstory, and the rest of the chapter is the characters discussing said backstory, reiterating the exact same information.
Instead of sticking to a single POV, we get bounced around through not just these three characters, but the victim, the killer, and a few side characters as well. None of them have enough of a distinctive voice to stand out from one another, which is made all the more confusing when we start a paragraph in one POV and finish in another.
The hand of the author is everywhere.
Characters stop investigating something because they decide they're hungry or feel the need to go meet up with someone or whatever. One character hears footsteps and door close in what is supposed to be an occupied portion of the hotel, while looking for a strange person, but instead of taking look, goes to find someone else and tell them about hearing the noise while they have dinner in the hotel dining room.
A hotel employee has the answers they need to complete the investigation, but rather than getting the info, the hotel security chief doesn't put up a fight when the informant's boss demands they get back to work. This novel could've been 50-75 pages shorter the characters had acted like people actively investigating a possible murder with the killer still in the area.
Characters interview someone else with potentially useful info, then talk with him again 20ish pages later, and seem to have forgotten who he is and his relationship with others involved in the case.
The killer and the red herring are painfully obvious as to what their role in the story is, not to mention that the killer is more or less given away by the title.
All in all, except for the length (250 or pages), _I Knew You When_ is on par with much of the work I've read in collegiate intro to fiction writing classes.
Displaying 1 of 1 review