Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm grateful that this was a library book. I have only read one or two of Ms. Scottoline's books over thirty years and now I remember why. Unlike some other reviewers, I have no complaint with the basis of the story. Arguing that the author shouldn't have employed a hit and run because other books have also is like saying "Huckleberry Finn" should have used a less utilized metaphor than a river. It's not the facts, it's what the author does with them. I believe that many parents would have let their children drive on an empty road. I believe that many parents' first instinct would have been to lie to protect a child. After that, I stopped believing. There was no circumstance under which a character whom we would ever care about again would leave that young woman behind and allow his son to watch that happen. Lie upon lie upon lie. Stupidity upon stupidity upon stupidity. Clearly, we are meant to feel for the bundle of whiny neuroses which is Jake, and to try to understand how his self-pity justifies the torture to which he subjects his son Ryan, the only character in the novel with any sort of moral compass. And Pam is awful--smug, smarmy, sanctimonious and a pedantic pain in the butt. I had forgotten Scottoline's annoying habit of abruptly stopping action to have a character explain a finer point of the law as though the reader were sitting in Con Law I. That Pam's ego is so enlarged that she would put her son and husband through an FBI investigation without even pausing to consider the strain on them is overshadowed only by her ludicrous position that letting your kid drive on a learner's permit is somehow a greater transgression than sleeping with your son's coach, lying about it, and carelessly allowing your son to find out about it. The only way anybody was going to escape intact in this book was if the poor victim was already dead when Ryan ran over her, so it was clear from the second chapter that that would happen. Pam's oversharing with and sycophancy toward Dr. Dave makes Jake the only poor fool who doesn't know his wife is cheating on him. Only a genuine suspension of disbelief allows the possibility that anyone would WANT to sleep with her (does she ever shut up?), particularly once you learn that Dr. Dave is a pedophile and Pam would be out of his age range. Nothing in this book rings true, although I really liked the dog. Unfortunately, he couldn't carry the whe story alone. Poor guy--stuck with these people.