This Mortal Coil

Rating:
Summary: Ambitious, but not quite there
Review: This is a semi-dark mystery filled with characters and action, lost love, broken hearts, and violent death. Because there are so many characters, none of them really stepped up and made an impression on me -- the novel would have had to be twice as long to give them room to become people. I found a lot of the dialogue overwrought, like something out of a B-movie, and not in that fun way. And the situations, especially the ones involving the two police officers who used to be partners, felt like retreads from stories I've read once too often. Again, given the space, the writer might have made these characters worth getting to know, but as it was she had to tell us too much, and show us too little.

I am usually pretty dumb about guessing "whodunnit," but I had the solution about four chapters into this one. At first I thought parts of my solution were so obvious that they had to be red herrings... but they weren't. It says nothing good about the story that I decided to flip to the end and check my guess. At which point, because I couldn't see any good reason to keep reading, I stopped about halfway through.

Given characters who breathed a little, instead of sitting there on the paper, and a plot that was more clearly a thriller rather than a cozy -- this one nbever really decided which it was -- this might have been a pretty good mystery. As it was, neither fish nor fowl, it just didn't hold my interest.