Rain

So I came into this expecting a murder case. Which sort of happened but not really. The ending was, predictable. Just, overall it felt slow and disjointed. It didn’t take long before the issues begun to show.

The first one is the chapters. Not starting on a new page isn’t really a big deal. I’ve done this. The problem is sometimes they were still in the same scene, so it was odd they were there. And the other times enough time had passed to warrant a chapter start so they made sense. So it was giving ‘I’m just going to put a new chapter here because it feels right.’ Almost as if the author genuinely didn’t understand how chapters work and an editor didn’t sort it out.

This is a period piece. And when I say that, I was 10 when this book happens and I’m now 43. So we are talking 30 years ago. That definitely should’ve been mentioned in the blurb even though this is a third book because it reads well enough without the first two. It does explain some of the judgemental or preachy expects of the story. You really cannot avoid the author’s opinions on things. There is no subtly about it at all.

Then, unfortunately, there were continuity errors. The coffee ones stand out. I honestly thought I was losing my mind a few times but there were at least three I can readily remember where second coffee was happening and I went back to see if I had missed something but no, first coffee had not happened. There was even one instance where the character got of the phone walked into another room to explain something and then… they hung up the phone. I reread that passage a good three times or more cause I was sure I must’ve missed something… I didn’t.

Things like this happened enough for them to stand out but by about halfway through the book I simply stopped double checking and kept things moving forward. Especially the one where he had trouble sleeping and kept waking up but then he woke up at a certain time officially. If he was having trouble sleeping the more likely thing would be he stopped trying to get a good sleep at a certain time and began his day. Saying he woke up implies he was sleeping like he should’ve been but it’s already been established that that’s not the case. This happens a lot too. Wording or situations that lend itself to one thing but then what actually happens doesn’t line up with what we’ve already been given.

The story doesn’t have any movement. The author will set up a scene with a whole lot of extra details that don’t really connect to what’s about to happen. Just information because they can in an attempt to set the scene, but it really just feels like information for the sake of information. But then a character will say something like ‘well I hope we never have to do that again’ and we could be hours or even a whole day later in the very next sentence. No page break. Nothing to signify passing of time. Just we are now outside somewhere else getting into a car or waking up at 5 am. This happens so frequently it made it hard to follow the story because the author never sits in the moment that the characters are in. They say a couple of sentences and then the new scene is happening before readers can even settle into the scene that’s been presented to them. And even more so when the author sidesteps to overly describe details about something or a job or a character that isn’t a main character. Transitions are non-existent and the author abruptly ends scenes so frequently I almost quit a few times.

There was one entire chapter, the hanging up and then hanging up again chapter I believe, where Bob is on the phone being responsive to news about a family member and then he explains it in a sentence or two. It was odd because the previous chapter was in his POV, so why, when he’s getting devastating news about his mother, is the story suddenly being told from Marcus’ view. Especially considering the scene has nothing to do with him. Why switch POV’s when the entire book really lives in Bob’s POV?

Also this book is all tell and very little show. The family keeps flying to see his mom, but nothing really happens when they are there. Most of the time is spent off page and not with them interacting. It feels very detached from the high emotional connection the author seems to want us to have and then, everyone’s going back home. No one really sits in it and so what it feels like is a massive slow down from the legit murder mystery because not enough page time is given to dealing with the characters emotions due to the off page story telling blended with the stilted say a few lines and move to the next scene format.

Most of the stuff on page is overly descriptive stuff about cities, and restaurants and judgy opinions about what school’s people go to and a clear disdain for a certain president (remember this is thirty years ago). It’s an extremely opinionated book in that regard and it didn’t really lend much to the plot which was the murder mystery. It didn’t really develop the characters either, it simply felt almost like agenda pushing. And on the judgey stuff, the straight up disdain everyone seems to have towards sexual freedom, besides the ones enjoying it, is frustrating. Especially when Bob is only 31. He and Marcus keep talking like it’s some young kid thing when Marcus himself is only 41 which is somewhat acceptable, but the other characters are somewhere around 23ish so the way Bob keeps judging them like they are kids is the strangest thing. He’s not that much older than them to be on such a superiority train while also in the same breath judging people because of the university they graduated from.

And how is he and his brother able to keep travelling so much at such a young age? Where is all this plane ticket money coming from? Are they really that well off in their jobs? Neither of them are over 35 and spent some time getting their education so they couldn’t have been practicing law that long. So, how are they doing this?

There’s so much more here but the over explaining what peoples jobs are, who characters where that were not relevant to the plot, explanations about restaurants and theatres and cities slowed the pace down a lot. The family drama that was never really fleshed out slowed down the plot. The authors tendency to simply end something like the time they went to a lecture I think, and Marcus had a one liner about why he hated them and then next scene. He hated it enough to speak but they aren’t going to talk about how much they were both bored to tears. After all the set up and description of what they were doing, they get there and… nothing. This happened often. Talk about a thing and then the thing finally starts and the next sentence the thing has happened and is over and shortly after that, sometimes immediately a new thing is happening. There’s no real movement between things. They just happen.

There was even a scene where someone says something inside a house and the very next reaction is bob and his partner saying something in the car. No page break no exiting the house. The very next sentence is their reaction in an entirely different scene.

This definitely needed a few more editing pass throughs to make the flow better and flesh out almost all the scenes that ended as quickly as they started and without page breaks or transitions into the follow up scenes. Over all, poor transitions, over explanations of things that weren’t relevant to the plot, and the tell and not show nature of this book added up to a hard and difficult read and the best part was the end when the book finally got moving. This book could’ve been great but it was mostly a distraction of underdeveloped things going on spliced with a slowly moving case that we new wasn’t going to go anywhere because from the very beginning the author told us and kept telling us. And then the predictable ending and a cliffhanger. So if you don’t like cliffhangers and read this review you’ve been warned.

The point being, so much was off here and the murder mystery I came in expecting to receive simply never landed and the writing style made it difficult to connect with the story I was presented with and simultaniously made it tedius reading.