Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

While it isn't the only genre of fiction I read, the promise of a good thriller is hard to pass up. I had heard marvellous things about this book before I downloaded it from one of my favorite book review sites. Unfortunately, I did not feel like this book lived up to the promise or the hype; I did not find it to be a particularly good thriller. The first thing that turned me off from the book was the very awkward turns of phrases and image descriptions that were meant to be evocative but were just odd (like comparing blood oozing down a neck to warmed-up, second-day turkey gravy). At times, I felt the author tried too hard to come up with a unique way of describing things, and that her attempts just fell flat or brought up images that were wrong or inappropriate at the moment (like the turkey gravy). As both a nurse and someone who has read and watched a lot of police procedurals and detective thrillers, I found this book to be riddled with errors in both the hospital aspects and the police procedures. After a certain point, I just felt like I was reading to see what gaffes she would make next! I don't like a book to be a “page turner” for that reason! For any fiction, there always needs to be a willing suspension of disbelief, but to me, that only extends so far. This book has such a wide variety of unlikely situations only loosely linked, so many questions left unanswered until the very end, unlikable and one-dimensional characters, and plot holes you could drive a truck through that it stretched that suspension of disbelief until it snapped and broke completely. It felt like the author certainly had too many components going on in the story, and she wasn’t able to handle them all deftly. She should have chosen a few and drilled down into those. All in all, I found this to be a very disappointing read. I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.