Tuesday's Child
by Dale MayerBook 1 of Psychic Visions
~ Goodreads ~
Rating: 2.0 Stars
What she doesn’t want... is exactly what he needs.
Shunned and ridiculed all her life for something she can’t control, Samantha Blair hides her psychic abilities and lives on the fringes of society. Against her will, however, she’s tapped into a killer—or rather, his victims. Each woman’s murder, blow-by-blow, ravages her mind until their death releases her back to her body. Sam knows she must go to the authorities, but will the rugged, no-nonsense detective in charge of tracking down the killer believe her?
Detective Brandt Sutherland only trusts hard evidence, yet Sam’s visions offer clues he needs to catch a killer. The more he learns about her incredible abilities, however, the clearer it becomes that Sam’s visions have put her in the killer’s line of fire. Now Brandt must save her from something he cannot see or understand... and risk losing his heart in the process.
As danger and desire collide, passion raises the stakes in a game Sam and Brandt don’t dare lose.
Shunned and ridiculed all her life for something she can’t control, Samantha Blair hides her psychic abilities and lives on the fringes of society. Against her will, however, she’s tapped into a killer—or rather, his victims. Each woman’s murder, blow-by-blow, ravages her mind until their death releases her back to her body. Sam knows she must go to the authorities, but will the rugged, no-nonsense detective in charge of tracking down the killer believe her?
Detective Brandt Sutherland only trusts hard evidence, yet Sam’s visions offer clues he needs to catch a killer. The more he learns about her incredible abilities, however, the clearer it becomes that Sam’s visions have put her in the killer’s line of fire. Now Brandt must save her from something he cannot see or understand... and risk losing his heart in the process.
As danger and desire collide, passion raises the stakes in a game Sam and Brandt don’t dare lose.
This is one of those books I like to call "Good Concept, Bad Execution," because the premise drew me into being interested, but the book itself wasn't all that great. To be honest, the first half of this book started decently with some good potential and good direction.
And I'm always upfront about this: I don't get along with paranormals. Paranormal mysteries are a nice exception. A good one I've been enjoying would be Kay Hooper's Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series. While her books aren't the best written, she has established a pretty concrete world of psychics with rules and systems that are pretty consistent from one book to another in the series.
But sometimes, even paranormal mysteries don't fair too well either. This book might be one of them. I'm not certain yet, because I didn't really hate the book--I just had a really big "MEH" moment towards the end. Because things could have been good but they weren't.
And because then (and I don't remember where in the book it happened) everything started happening all at once that only surfaced as negative marks against the book:
- So many typos that couldn't be ignored.
- Fact inconsistencies that sprung up, two or three chapters apart.
- Poor editing in terms of quotation marks, pronoun usage, run-on sentences, fragmented sentences, double negatives... I could go on.
- Unnecessary scene breaks.
- Inconsistent location transitions. (Sometimes I'm not sure when the couple ended up from "out on the porch" to "in the living room and moving up to the bedroom without locking the doors of a secluded cabin while a killer and a menace are both out to take the heroine's life.")
- Unnecessary POV switches in narration that included unnecessary side tangents.
- Repeated conversations and repeated information monologues.
- Too many monologues that were unnecessary and insignificant to the story.
- A psychic universe logic that didn't seem to make much sense as part of the paranormal logic within the realm of this book. Probably psychic "ideals" kept being included that felt like they were being used as a deus ex machina to explain everything that had to do with the psychic stuff. This ties in with fact inconsistencies.
- Laughable case investigations--because it felt like a whole lot of nothing was accomplished without the psychic's own first-hand knowledge of the murders. And even then the only reason the murderer was caught was because the psychic was used as bait. There was never any concrete evidence to go on at all.
Also one last tidbit: Alcohol doesn't really destroy DNA. The killer should have been carrying bleach wipes with him or something else that could inhibit DNA detection. Bleach would have been more useful in degradation of DNA. If that's what he was going for with the whole "wiping his victims down with alcohol" thing since, I guess, his sweat and spit was dripping onto the victim? (Gross...)
Conclusion: This book could have really benefited from a few beta-reads and several really good editors, because I'm of the impression that, if this book had been edited, then that editor got really lazy towards the end.
This review was originally posted at Ani's Book Abyss / BookLikes in August 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment