When Detective Senior Sergeant, Susan Prescott and her
daughter, Marli, arrive in a rural community to
house-sit for relatives, they witness a very public
murder within an hour of arrival. Shell-shocked from a
tragedy at work and domestic upheaval, the last thing
Susan wants is to become involved. An encounter with an
elderly lady causes her fragile confidence to waver; the
hint of a long ago murder is not a secret with which she
wants to be entrusted.
Against her better judgement, she is drawn inexorably
into the investigation, surrounded by menacing strangers
whose private agendas threaten Susan’s safety and soon,
her life.
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I am a lover of good crime fiction, and this story
really appealed to me.
It was one of those stories you can’t put down, and I
found myself still reading in the wee hours of the
morning. The story was intriguing, and the main
characters were well rounded.
In the beginning, and even further into the book, I
found it difficult to keep up with who was who. This
stemmed from the sheer number of secondary characters
the author included in the book.
There were close to ten secondary characters, maybe even
more, with several of them introduced very early in the
book. Plus they came in quick succession. That caused
me quite a bit of confusion.
Many publishers don’t allow authors to have more than
2-4 ‘featured’ secondary characters for this very
reason.
The story centered around several seemingly related
murders within the one family. The author wrote a very
well thought out, and obviously well plotted story. It
kept me guessing right up until the very end.
I don’t want to spoil the story for readers, so I won’t
reveal much about the story itself, except to say if you
like a good crime story you can really get into, this
book is probably for you.
For most of the book, Ms Hockley used 3rd
person omniscient POV (point of view), which is how most
books are written. (This is basically the all-knowing,
all-seeing narrator, which allows the reader to know
what’s going on inside several character’s heads.)
However, when it came to telling the story from the main
character’s POV, she slipped – quite purposely – into
first person POV. In this instance, we’re getting only
that character’s view point, which is fine. Many crime
writers employ this method, but this method alone.
I found it extremely distracting, and somewhat annoying
as I was pulled out of my comfortable reading zone, and
dragged into a totally different standpoint whenever
this happened.
At about the three quarter point of the story, the story
jumped into a scene that was totally out of place. One
moment the character was in a house, then suddenly that
same character was in a car.
I went back over the proceeding pages to find what I
missed, but it simply wasn’t there. This made it
difficult to follow the rest of the scene.
A good editor should have found this error before
publication, but alas did not.
Overall this was a good book, and one that I’d
recommend.
