Mystery/Thriller -- 2 1/2 stars
Audiobook Narration -- 2 1/2 stars
Book: Mickie Lambert works for a company that creates digital scrapbooks. She has just begun working on one for Nadia Denham, owner of a local junk shop, when Ms. Denham dies from what is originally called a suicide. Mickie decides it's up to her to prove that conclusion wrong. ----- There is one word that comes to mind for this book: busy. There is so much going on, murder/suicide, secret notes left under Mickie's door, secrets Mickie discovers in her own family, new boyfriend, old boyfriend, gentrification, a wedding, a stranger watching from the shadows... None of them are truly connected to the main story of Nadia Denham which makes for a disordered story that just made me tired trying to keep up. Add to that the fact that the police appear absent from the Nadia investigation, (leaving a scrapbook maker as the main investigator?) while being wholly involved in Mickie's family secrets. If this book were a painting, it would be a piece of Impressionism--lots of little dabs. There is an interesting twist near the end, but again, why were the police uninvolved in its discovery? Better editing, more focus, less extraneous threads would have made a much better story.
Narration: I have run into Susan Dalian once before. An easy voice to listen to with good inflection, but she has an odd pattern of splitting sentences in the middle for no apparent reason. "Her best friend...pause, pause, pause...had just called three minutes ago." This style stopped the flow of an already disjointed book.
No comments:
Post a Comment