Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After reading mostly self-published authors recently, I decided to take Amazon's suggestion, pay full price, and read a debut novel backed by an agent, editor and publisher. What a disappointment. Three chapters in I was so annoyed i was ready to quit. But I kept going out of a sort of morbid curiosity. What were all these people seeing to merit five star reviews? Mary Kubica writes well. And she started with an intriguing plot concept, a kidnapping for ransom that is not what it seems. But her approach to presenting the story did not work for me at all. Kubica tells the story through three different first-person narratives: the Mother, the Kidnapper, and the Detective, and bounces the reader crazily back and forth between Before the kidnapping ends and After. Incredibly, the Good Girl, who should be the protagonist, is not a viewpoint character until the nonsensical Epilogue. The other viewpoint characters often tell us the Good Girls thoughts and feelings, which always had me yelling "how do they know?". As a result of this structure, I never came to like or care about any of the characters. It did not help that each is presented as shallow, pathetic and self-loathing. The unappealing structure was made worse by frequent plot holes and factual errors. The text often betrayed Kubica's urban sensibilities and lack of knowledge on many subjects. Canoes are not made of material that rusts, lakes freeze from the edges, and people have happily survived the winter for centuries in dwellings heated with wood. The cabin she describes has running water and electricity, but no cable TV - the horror. Next time Amazon recommends a book, I'm going to read the critical reviews before I click "buy now".