Review: Potential, but authorial inexperience shows
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 25, 2014
There was a lot of potential in this story of small town drama and mystery, it's like a trashy slice of life book.  Although it isn't supernatural at all and it avoids the absurd, the focus on the contrast between appearances and reality reminded me of "Twin Peaks."  But man, it's rough in some spots.The book starts with a couple dozen detailed character bios.  It's completely inappropriate for a novel -- the author should be using the story to convey this information and it is an overwhelming amount of information for readers to process before the story even beings.  With your head spinning from all of this character information, the story begins with the discovery that one of the characters has been murdered.The author has set her story in a small town of around 500 people, but details of the story don't make sense in this setting.  We're told that the detective has worked his way up to the role, but how big can the police force be?  A town of 500 people wouldn't even have a detective, let alone substantial ranks to work up through.The grasp on the time period is even more problematic.  Nobody acts as if they are a product of 1960s Wyoming.  It seems as if the author doesn't understand much about the 1960s at all, especially how people acted and spoke.  The amount of cursing (and the modern nature of how the curses are used) seems completely incongruous for small town residents of the period, as well as how they arrange their lives (an engaged couple lives together and this doesn't strike anyone as remarkable or odd, for example).  At another point, we're told that a woman played "Love Me Do" at her husband's funeral to celebrate all the good times the couple had dancing to it -- however the man in question died before it was released as a single in the US.  While it might be plausible that a character in New York was into the Beatles before their singles were released in the US, it just doesn't follow that a couple in Wyoming was so far ahead of the cultural curve.I think this author has a good story in her, it's just not this one.  I like the flair for drama, but I kept being jerked out of the story.Note:  The first two installments of this serial were published in 2011 and it doesn't appear that the story was ever completed (or, if it was, it isn't currently available on Amazon).