Kathryn Clippard

Less than half an hour into the audiobook - Daisy's just got to her Nan's house - and I can barely choke down another second. How are books like this popular? The author fairly hits you over the head with her salient points like your short term memory might be broken. At only 28 minutes, she's made it very clear - in a very melodramatic way each time - that TIME is short; death is near (or is it?!); time could be running out; there isn't much time; the clocks are ticking!! Do you get it, do you get it?? The narrator is so boring that I can understand only too well why she might be alone in life, and why her siblings stay away. All she can do is whine about her lack of time. At 29 or whatever age she is now, I submit that she's had plenty. A secret, you say? Keep it, I say. There's no way it's interesting enough to warrant wading through this rubbish.

This book is simply not for me. I gave up by chapter 5. The build-up is too long, full of irrelevant information that stops the plot in its tracks. The book feels like a vehicle for the author to demonstrate her knowledge of the writers and era she has researched, but isn't a good recommendation of her own ability to write a crime novel. I'm not interested in meandering, chatty books that don't get to the point sharpish. I'm not interested in meeting irrelevant characters. I'm not interested in being taken through irrelevant scenarios that just will not end. By the time the body finally enters the story, I just don't care, so deftly has the author clobbered my brain into numbness with irrelevant happenings and the narrator's gossipy observations.

I found this book plodding and formulaic. I liked Locke's previous books in this series, but this one fell flat for me. The writing, not the ideas, was the problem for me. The rhythm was bogged down by unnecessary details that didn't move the story along or illustrate anything important about the characters. This was made all the more frustrating by the fact that there's obviously a good story here, but it has been poorly edited. Locke seems not to have a good grasp of how real conversations are held between people, and she has her former Ranger behave, in one particular scene with a frat brother, in a completely unbelievable way that is not consistent with his usual comportment. In this particular piece of a story that overall is clumsily stitched together, it feels like she's she's created an ultimately unnecessary scene just to fabricate drama and delay - again - the momentum of the narrative. Even with what was for me a less well written story, I could visualize her well-drawn characters and their surroundings, and I do hope this series will get written for a network or film, because these books offer excellent material. Her ideas and what she is trying to say are worth the extra work you'll need to put in to get through this book.

Too many twists, too much misery. I'm all for suspension of disbelief, but this is the book that made me sigh with fatigue: end it, already. Also, by this point, I'm exasperated with Hole's determination to be miserable for no reason. Here again, I'm all for moody detectives and dark places in the mind, but the relentless grind of self-loathing does have its limits, at least for me. Not enough humor to balance the onslaught of the protagonist's self hatred and that of almost every single other character in the book. And his mooning over Raquelle! I cant stand it for one more second, it's too pathetic. Everything together is too bleak. All that said, I can't deny that I listened to all 22 hours or so (with frequent fast forwarding for the last 5 hours) because there are compelling sections and the writing is good. And I Iike the dark humor of the author giving his detective a name that, in English, is a play on words and we are forced to think of a hairy hole every time a character says his name. Which is often.