Review: A Love story wrapped in a mystery
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 30, 2012
The plot was nothing new -- a mysterious girl who may or may not have killed someone -- and I figured out the "mystery" by about the halfway point. What kept me reading was the character of Billy Ray. Unreliable narrators have been used before with varying degrees of success, but this time it worked. Billy Ray is "slow" but functional, living alone with Big Dog in his cabin, and he doesn't think to ask questions when Charlene shows up needing a place to stay. Their idyllic life is shattered with the death of a neighbor, a crime in which Charlene is implicated.  Billy Ray is honest and trusting -- the kind of man who is easily manipulated by those around him, from the sheriff who tries to pin the crime on him, to lawyers (for both sides) who want him to make their case. You feel his confusion and hurt as he learns more about the girl he loves, and yet you want to cheer at his belief in her inherent goodness. He knows who she was with him, and can't quite reconcile that with the picture others have painted.There is a nagging detail that is never quite cleared up (there is a suspicion that he is related somehow to the case but nothing is ever found) but I guess in real life there are always a few unanswered questions. It would have made more sense to just eliminate that completely, since it really didn't add anything to the story. The other issue I had was the last-minute phone call that cleared everything up. It wasn't clear how this person even knew about the investigation or why he waited so long to reveal his story, and it was almost too easy after such a torturous journey. There is also a weird formatting glitch to my Kindle version -- text is centered on the page so all the lines were a different length. It was annoying but not a deal-breaker.On the whole, this was just a little more than the sum of its parts. Characters that felt real and stay with you after the ending, an unusual sort of love story, and enough suspense to pull you along. I enjoyed this book and will probably check out more by this author.