Book-a-book of the Month Club discussion

Discuss the characters here

At 10%
Intrigued by Helen. Not your typical police officer. Her partner seems to be more stereotypical.
I hope Amy comes out of her shock and defends herself!

Vicki wrote: "At 10%
Intrigued by Helen. Not your typical police officer. Her partner seems to be more stereotypical.
I hope Amy comes out of her shock and defends herself!"

Yes Helen definitely has a LOT going on.

Josen wrote: "Yes Helen definitely has a LOT going on. "

Yes! Just when you think you know who the chapter is talking about . . .

Man! Helen is like a bull in a china shop . . . if you are near, she may destroy you before she thinks through want she is doing. An interesting character, but her lack patience and analysis before acting is scary!

Matthew wrote: "Man! Helen is like a bull in a china shop . . . if you are near, she may destroy you before she thinks through want she is doing. An interesting character, but her lack patience and analysis before..."

Lol that's true! Her actions really affect people in detrimental ways.

I actually liked most of the characters. They seemed like real, flawed people. I enjoyed them. Much better than cookie cutter perfect police officers.

Richard wrote: "I actually liked most of the characters. They seemed like real, flawed people. I enjoyed them. Much better than cookie cutter perfect police officers."

Yeah - Helen was kind of crazy! The more I learned about her I wasn't sure if I should me more frightened of her or the killer.

Omg that's so true lol! Helen was a tad bit on the crazy side herself.

Well, since she is related to the killer, I guess that will always be a question in future.

Matthew wrote: "Man! Helen is like a bull in a china shop . . . if you are near, she may destroy you before she thinks through want she is doing. An interesting character, but her lack patience and analysis before..."

I completely agree. I would hope, for the sake of the world that police work is not done like this. I'm not even sure how she has a job. I would think that she would have been thrown out on her ass, be on probation or possibly be in prison herself by now if how she's acting is indicative of how she does police work.

Mark: To me he is the most believable character. I know his drinking is cliche, but at least it seems the most consistent with human behavior. His internal struggle with his wife being able to move away and on with her life successfully leaving him in the dust was palpable. His drinking, without a history of drinking problems including knowledge of AA and or therapy was quite the opossite of believable. I just don't see a man older than 30 picking up the drink because he's down on life. I would much more likely see him falling back on his prior coping skills or committing suicide, which made his eventual suicide very prolonged.

Helen: She's an emotionally unstable dumb ass that has some how become the head of the homicide detective unit. I hate to say it, but her role very much, to me, seemed like it was written by a man. For a while I thought the book was written by a woman and I was like, "How has the author nailed Mark but Helen seems wholly unrealistic?" and then I read about the author and was like, "that is how. Oh."

Charlee: I don't even know what to say here. She wasn't very well developed. I kept feeling like she was just tacked in there to fill the void while Mark was under investigation. She got pregnant, what? When? Wasn't she running herself ragged trying to catch the killer, but somehow in the middle of sleep deprivation and assumed shitty eating her hard time of conceiving is concluded just in time for her to become a victim of the bumbling antagonist. Why does she never call for backup? Why does she never put any evidence together? Most importantly, why is she in the book? LOL.

Tanner: Crazed psychopath that attacks a police officer for no reason.

Physics: Don't apply. Did you know that if you drink your urine as the only source of water you'll actually speed up renal failure? A healthy person's urine is 95% water. An injured, sick, dehydrated or pregnant person's urine is closer to bleach.

The therapist: Haha, what? Why did she run away? oh right, we needed more suspense. Clearly her patient confidentiality doesn't apply when the cops are following her.

Susan: She likes killing people, now? I'm guessing she's been doing it for a very long time. Which seemed like a much more interesting story to me.

Joe wrote: "Mark: To me he is the most believable character. I know his drinking is cliche, but at least it seems the most consistent with human behavior. His internal struggle with his wife being able to move..."

Well I like that you don't hold back on your views on the book. Lol!

As for Mark: I thought they did talk about his drinking being a problem in his past. No??

Charlee: Yes I kinda' feel the same in that she really wasn't well developed and just thrown in to remind us she was a character.

Physics: Ummm......I didn't know that. Lol!

Overall, I mentioned this to my coworker who has read the book before and she mentioned that maybe the book is the way it was because it's the first in a series. So maybe this first book is just a development of characters and cliffhangers(?).

Josen wrote: "Well I like that you don't hold back on your views on the book. Lol!"

Yup - boom! Joe is back! :)

I would agree that in general the characters were shallow and unbelievable. The majority of what they are doing was obviously to move the story along, whether it made sense or not.

But, after the first 50 pages, that is what I expected and it became kind of humorous to me (like, what's next?), so I just rolled with it.

I like hearing your perspective, though, Joe - it made me realize a few more oddities about the characters I had not considered.

As for Mark: I thought they did talk about his drinking being a problem in his past. No??

Oh, maybe I missed that. They were talking about how he was turning into an alcoholic. Which made me think that he never had a drinking problem before because once an alcoholic always an alcoholic.

it made me realize a few more oddities about the characters I had not considered.

What are things did you notice?

Mostly it was more things they did that did not make sense.

And, one huge thing I was going to mention in one of the threads - and I guess it can go here - is that throughout the book there were chunks of days missing. And, based on what the characters said and were doing, it sounds like they did nothing to advance the story during those days.

Example - someone would get abducted and the next chapter they had been missing for a week and they were just starting to work on it.

oh, haha. Yeah. I actually put the book down out of disbelief and thought about not picking it back up when Charlee and Mark were caught and suddenly almost two weeks shot by. And all the things that were listed were like a days worth of things.

I completely forgot about Charlee as a character. As far as Helen, the more I think, the less I like her. She seems like like 15 characters in one. There is way too much going on with her.

I agree, I think an attempt to make Helen "interesting" she was involved in a whole bunch of different things. One thing I didn't understand... her guilt.

If she felt justified in having her sister arrested for the murder of her parents why then was she also sooooooo conflicted that she insisted on paying Jake to whip her until she was scarred. Oh crap I forgot about Jake, what an awful side story. When they revealed that was why she was going to Jake I think I audibly went, "WHAT THE F**K!? PICK A SIDE!"

I get being conflicted about something. Like, "I bought the brown shoes, but what I really needed was a gray pair of shoes so I didn't have to buy two pairs of shoes." If that can drive me a little nuts I'm sure making the decision to incarcerate your sibling would be a far more complex feeling until you throw in the part where she killed two people. You're either on one side of that fence or the other. It would have been more believable if Helen thought her sister was a jerk and called the police on her for what she was thinking would be a minor drug offense, but then it turned out Susan was holding two kilos of poorly cut cocaine for her drug dealing boyfriend and ended up doing 25 years for intent to sell, and pre-meditated malice/homicide.

So on top of that, Helen was an orphan, which was glazed over. Next Helen became a cop, okay that's actually pretty sound I bet most cops are either familiar with crime in a personal way or are family members with judiciary personnel.

And then Helen decides to lock herself away socially, seemingly having a casual fling her and there for what sounds like a couple decades only to make it to middle management through perseverance in a male dominated culture. She never has a family and barely has any friends apart from the mom and daughter living in the ghetto. She has no desire to play the political landscape. And more to a fault she can not seem to put two pieces of evidence together without consulting her gut, which is 99.99% of the time wrong (even in her personal life).

Yeah, there's a lot going on there. Helen sounds really, really boring to me. I think that was made it hard to like her. She's sort of played out.

One thing I realized while compiling this list is that Helen was very trusting of other women, and used men. I could see that more if she was an addict. She's clearly using Jake, so it'd be cool if later she was actually kidding herself and she wasn't doing the self-harm because she felt guilty, but instead it's because she's a sex addict, or a killer herself. Really anything. She's got a severe eating disorder would make more sense.

For awhile, I thought it was going to be Helen that was the "bad guy" - if Goodreads didn't call this Helen Grace #1 I might have believed that.

Again, she scared me, and other than trying to Mark stop drinking, she did not have a while lot of redeeming qualities.

Oh yeah, there was definitely a period of time where I was thinking that might happen. Especially since there was a lot of anonymity around who it was that was talking about trying to kill their dad. But I couldn't tell if that was a female until the rape segment.

I think that was something the author wanted you to believe because the fact that there was a younger sister wasn't in there until much later. As soon as the other bunk was mentioned that part came together for me.

I even thought the way that she got Mark to stop drinking was scary. I was like, who does she think she is? She's making herself Mark's safety net and enabling him to do something that is harmful. He wants to stop drinking, not try to control his drinking.

Joe wrote: "I even thought the way that she got Mark to stop drinking was scary. I was like, who does she think she is? She's making herself Mark's safety net and enabling him to do something that is harmful. He wants to stop drinking, not try to control his drinking. "

Yeah - that crossed my mind too. More of an enabler than a helper.

Helen is a control freak. She wants to be in control in every aspect of her life including her "punishment". Jake doesn't even have control there. She dictates the rules. When she can't, she ignores every semblance of a conscience (if she even has one). If she were a real person, I would say that she is on her way to a nervous breakdown of disastrous proportions.

Yeah, like that one time she showed up and pushed Jake's other client out. I can imagine that privacy would be a big thing in that industry. I also couldn't believe that Jake would continue to give two shits about her. Here he is, in a field where he must deal with damaged individuals all the time and for some fucking reason he takes a liking to Helen. The crazy female police officer that won't talk to him, bullies him and ignores the constitution that he has with his clients. I would feel sorry for that guy if he existed and if he had a spine.