Mystery/Thriller -- 2 stars
Bell Elkins - Book 8
In the woods outside Acker's Gap, West Virginia you'll find the ruins of a former mental hospital, one where, in its heyday, electroshock therapy and lobotomies were the cure for just about everything. Today, Acker's Gap is home to its own detective agency, an agency made up of a retired sheriff, a disbarred ex-prosecutor, and a disabled former deputy. The long abandoned hospital is where Bell Elkins, one third of the town's unofficial investigative team, finds the body of a missing teen. When Bell and her cohorts discover that the teen's grandmother was killed in the same place, the hunt is on to find a connection and the killer. ----- The backbone of this series is the detective agency, and it just didn't work for me. First, you've got these three people who claim to be part of a detective team, but who seem to only follow their own ideas with no coordination at all. Then you have the real law enforcement people who do nothing but show up at odd times to ask what Bell or her group have discovered. The result is a mish mash of clues known by some of the players but not others. The story idea has good bones--a defunct mental hospital, a family secret, a hidden diary, two family deaths a generation apart but connected to the mental hospital. It's the execution that fails. The background story of the operation of the hospital is interesting, and grandma's hidden diary is well written leaving some hope that this book will end well. Instead, the ending manages to be both trite and awkward. A surprise antagonist sprung at the last minute doesn't help.
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