Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book can't decide if it wants to be a police procedural, a Harlequin romance, or a Stephen King horror story. The writing is startlingly uneven and riddled with factual errors. It goes along like a perfectly decent murder mystery for a time, but then you hit some jarring error like the tide going out when it needed to be coming in (to cut off access to the tidal island); or the attraction between the two lead characters veers off into ridiculous internal dialogue or bodice-ripping action; or a seemingly decent, sympathetic character is revealed to be a drug-using Satan-worshipper. I began to wonder whether three different authors had alternated sections, challenging each other to find a way to continue the narrative after ever-more-bizarre plot turns. The plot becomes progressively more preposterous as it goes along, generating lots of eye-rolling on the part of this reader, and culminates in a cartoon-ish last-second rescue (on a dark and stormy night!). The mystery is that whole sections are written quite competently, and I have to think that with the help of a good editor, this could have been a dramatically better book.