Silent Warning

by Kathleen Long

Silent Warning by Kathleen Long released on May 10, 2005 is available now for purchase.

256 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published May 1, 2005

About the author

Kathleen Long is the author of sixteen novels in the genres of women’s fiction, contemporary romance, and romantic suspense.

Kathleen has won a RIO Award and is a two-time winner of the Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence. Her additional honors include nominations for National Readers’ Choice, RITA, HOLT Medallion, Booksellers’ Best, and Book Buyers Best awards, as well as appearances on the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.

A native of Wilmington, Delaware, she now divides her time between suburban Philadelphia and the New Jersey shore.

When Kathleen is not plotting her next book or teaching creative writing, she spends her time bribing her tween to pick up her clothes, begging the dog to heel, and experimenting with photography.

Reviews

[Sati Marie Frost · Rating 2 out of 5]

This started out well enough. For some reason it was one I couldn't get into years ago, but this time round I found it quite exciting. Rachel, an investigative journalist, is murdered in the prologue. Afterward, her estranged friend Kelly comes to stay in her house for a few days and pack up her possessions. Kelly is approached by Dan, a man who believes that Rachel's murder was connected to the death of his sister a while back. Kelly is disbelieving at first - Rachel's death has so far been considered an accidental drowning / overdose on Oxygesic, a new, very strong painkiller. But after getting shot at and having the house ransacked, Kelly starts to see things from Dan's point of view and the two strive to solve the murders of Rachel and Dan's sister Diane, and find out how they're connected to a drug ring in town.

The first half of the book was fine, if unremarkable. It was an interesting mystery set at just the right pace for me, and I enjoyed it. My first problem came when Kelly found out that Dan and Rachel had been lovers for a brief time in the past. Kelly's having feelings for Dan by this point, and she throws a temper tantrum when she finds this out. Not cool, Kel. Everyone's got a past. I was surprised by how angry she got about this, when it was well in the past, before she ever met Dan.

Of course, they make up after that. Problem #2 came when Kelly discovered that Dan was part of the company that developed Oxygesic, and that's why he's racked with guilt and so desperate to solve the murders. The readers knew that Dan helped to create the drug well before Kelly did, and were privy to Dan's torment and emotional self-flagellation, so I was curious about how she'd react when she finally found out. She'd be nice about it, right? She'd wrap her arms around him, and comfort him, and tell him that it wasn't his fault, that he'd been trying to do a good thing to make a drug that would help cancer patients and others cope with extreme pain? And some of his guilt would lift now that he'd found absolution through love. Right?

Wrong. She totally melts down, and says she'll never trust him again, that he's betrayed her. Again, for something that happened long before he met her, and something that came about accidentally. I think one sentence here is the most telling thing in the whole book - "You may as well have killed Diane yourself, isn't that right?"(p. 182.)

Someone you purportedly care about tries to do a good thing and it backfires, with tragic results that couldn't have been foreseen, and he's absolutely eaten up with guilt and shame about it - and instead of soothing him, you tell him that he might as well have killed the victims himself? That is unforgivable . People who are grieving the loss of a friend, even one they'd cut out of their life and refused to forgive (are you seeing a theme here?) get cut a lot of slack, but nobody, grieving or not, should ever utter the above sentence.

Disgusted, I almost gave up on the book at this point, but there was so little left to go that I plodded on, sick at heart and no longer enjoying the mystery.

I'm sorry to say, Dan does not dump Kelly for the awful way she handled his two "betrayals" but instead follows her around, trying to apologise. Forget it, Dan. I'd have wanted an apology from HER - an apology that isn't forthcoming - and even then I might not have been able to get over what she said. Kelly mentions in several places through the book that her childhood made her someone who holds grudges, but instead of trying to change herself she seems oddly proud of this fact. Ugh. I hate people who are proud of things like that.

So I'm sorry to say that overall, I didn't enjoy Silent Warning. I think I hate books that let me down in the middle even more than ones that are crummy from the start, because it's such a shock when it happens. Sadly, this was one of those. Would have got 3 or 3.5 stars from me, but a pussy-whipped hero and a girl who suddenly morphed into one of the most unlikable heroines I've met in a long time put this definitely in the 2-star category.