Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsCannot believe the number of 4 & 5 star ratings for this book...
Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2017
I bought 3 books in the Crosswhite series and cannot believe they have so many 4 and 5 star ratings. The BEST thing I can say about these books is that you can read/listen to them in any order and it doesn't matter. Each book tells a whole story from beginning to end so you don't need to follow a trail in this series. That's the ONLY good thing about them!
The reason you can read these books in any order is because these books tell the same story over and over again! Beautiful, young, female, top-notch detective investigating old cases involving missing women who end up dead. Each ends up being murder (of course) with wrongful prosecution and/or cause of death resulting from incompetent and corrupt law enforcement behind a shady cover up. The beautiful young detective is stalked by every crazed psychopath within a 100 mile radius...making me ponder if they'd run into each other a time or two while watching her through her bedroom window or at the local Starbucks...hey, maybe they met for coffee to watch her together!?!? In each book, our sharp little detective also trusts her gut instincts and puts together the tiniest of puzzle pieces to uncover the cover ups, solve the crime and bring justice to all...yet she misses the BIG things like a male being in her home while she's out and leaving the toilet seat up, her backyard motion detectors being tripped multiple times when she's home alone, a snow covered car with a clear windshield in multiple locations, her cat being locked outside of her "fortress" home when she knew he had been locked inside...these glaring clues, she shrugs off...so ridiculous. In each book, it is snowing or raining in each of her investigations as well so the detective and other characters are either brushing the snow from their faces or feeling the rain trickle down their backs. Despite the stories taking place in different places/settings, having different characters and different details about the murders and cover-ups, the tale unfolds exactly the same in every book making what I presume the author intended as plot twists so painfully predictable. You know those books that make you roll your eyes and blurt out, "Oh for goodness sakes." or something a little more colorful? Well, these are those books tenfold.
Additionally, the author fixates on specific words and phrases and repeats them over and over...bare light bulbs hanging overhead, the ability to complete a sex act in the time it takes to boil pasta, fending off the cat while trying to open a can of cat food and the word "glock"...never "her gun" or "her service weapon" or "her side arm"...always glock...and you'd be hard pressed to find one paragraph in any of these books that does not reference her glock. It's annoying enough to have to deal with all this repetition in a single book but, when it repeats in ALL of the books, it becomes intolerable.
I gave the first book, "My Sister's Grave" a 3 star because, as a stand alone, it would have been an average read. With regards to the other two books, I could not be nearly as forgiving or kind. Additionally, the reader in the audiobook is terrible at age and gender inflection. Ugh...
