pagesofjulia

Back on the fence about this series, but I keep coming back for more. Hannah is doing something right.

Pros: page-turner. I stay riveted, engaged and invested. I was drawn in, in this book in particular, by the possibility that we were finally going to get into the heart of Kate’s biggest issue in her personal and private lives: her conflicted relationship with her own sexuality and her attempt to live a closeted life at work while maintaining a same-sex relationship with (no less) a colleague. That conflict feels like the shoe that’s been waiting to drop for this whole series, and the specter of resolving it was a major pull – as well as the mystery plot being a solid one. (I don’t think I’ve ever had beef with the mystery itself in any of these books.)

More ambivalent: the central conflict about Kate’s coming out, and the solidifying of her relationship with Jo, threatened to be a bit on the nose, especially in combination with the mystery plot and the potential relevance of gay identity in that storyline. “Suddenly she couldn’t differentiate between her own situation and that of —–. If she found out that his death was connected to his homosexuality it would open up a wound she’d been hiding for years. A bleeding open wound she’d been trying and failing to live with. The reason she’d thrown away all that was good in her life.” Not only on-the-nose, but awfully thoroughly spelled out for my tastes. Let the reader do a little work!

Cons: dialog and sentence-level writing continue to distract me. Speaking of thoroughly spelled out, would a cop really need to say, “I’ll call you later, if I can. Service is patchy here. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.” In the 2010s, you have to explain what patchy service means? Or in describing scraps of debris on the ground: “Some kind of confectionary wrapper… and what looks suspiciously like a cannabis joint.” No humor, no irony: “what looks suspiciously like a cannabis joint.” Nobody talks like that. There was also a continued emphasis on ‘stuff’ when ANY noun would do more and better.

The resolution of the plot puzzle felt a bit chaotic. Not quite a deus ex machina, but multiple (and unrelated) unhinged characters running roughshod. Upon finishing the book I was left a little muddled as to who did what to whom, because it all dissolved into mayhem. And fair enough, because that’s the way the world goes sometimes, but this was not Hannah’s cleanest finish. And speaking of the finish: literally the last line of this novel thrusts us upon the hugest cliffhanger I’ve seen in a while, and quite a fantastical one to boot. I don’t think I’m happy with this move.

Despite all this, my experience in reading was that I really enjoyed the book, in some mammoth sessions. And started the next one immediately. So, not sure where this leaves us. It’s not a love/hate relationship, but certainly a love/not-love relationship that I am in with the DCI Kate Daniels series.

Help.

EDIT: The next book in this series, Without a Trace, was distressingly bad. I cannot review it here and am not sure where to turn next. Warning.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: LGBTQ, mystery |