Amy R. (AmyMarie) - , reviewed on 7/4/2015 + 46 more book reviews

There are some books that are so full of petty, ridiculous little inconsistencies that the entire story ends up being ruined. For me, this was one of those books.

My first clue this was going to turn into a hate-read for me was when the main character does a massive backstory info-dump about how she became Chief of Police by the age of thirty. She comments that when she was hired (in one place it says three years earlier, and in another it says two years, so she would have been either 27 or 28), she had a degree in criminal justice and eight years experience as a cop. This doesn't jive at all with having run away at 18, then spending a year drinking and partying before getting a job as a police dispatcher then getting her GED and enrolling college. Even if she started school at 19 and only completed an associate's degree, that would have made her 21 when she graduated, which wouldn't have allowed for eight years of experience by age 28. Of course later, she amends this to say she enrolled in a criminal justice program at the community college and finished in a year. One year at a community college does not equal a degree. Nor does her explanation of how she was hired due to political issues of balancing the "English" against the Amish in this small town hold any water at all, especially when combined with the fact that every single damn person who works at the police station is thirty or younger. Apparently "Pickles," the grumbling 70+ retiree, was the only cop working in this small town at all before Katie showed up at the wise old age of 28 and hired a bunch of stereotypical 20-somethings.

Riiiiight.

Now, in and of itself, that's one minor complaint that I might have ignored. The problem is, nearly every chapter produces another similar complaint. Katie's blindness when it comes to a critical plot point regarding her rapist is absurd and rambles on for 2/3 of the book. She yells at her brother multiples times for not being able to point out the location of a grave, even though he tells her over and over that he wasn't there and doesn't know. In one scene, Katie arrives at a bar at 10:00 am. We flash to a girl who gets of school for the afternoon, runs home, goes ice skating for hours, then discovers a body. Somehow her call to police comes in ten minutes after Katie arrived at the bar. So, around 5 or 6pm at the pond, but still just after 10:00 am at the bar. The police magically track down everybody in the town who's purchased condoms in the last week, but can't manage to enter any of the crime information into major crime databases. The big BCI investigator packs up and leaves as soon as an arrest is made, even though evidence is flimsy. The entire novel is just one bungling, idiotic thing after the next until Katie breaks the case wide open with, of all things, a simple google search. Of course when she calls the BCI agent with a mountain of evidence, he blows it off as her paranoid before rushing in to save her. I only finished the book because I wanted to see if my prediction was correct. (It was.)

Throw in a bunch of bizarre POV shifts, some of them in past third and some in present first, plus a completely flat, boring, and totally predictable romance angle between Katie and the BCI agent, and you get one major flop of a book.

Summary: Bad. Just... frustratingly bad.

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