Review: The writing is OK but the characters and the plot are not
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 27, 2012
This story is not badly written and I think the author has the capability to write a decent novel. That would however require a lot more work on the characters and the plot.A few examples regarding the characters: The main charachter, Kim, is "notorious for spending it as I made it" - yet she has so much stashed away that she can spend thousands of dollars on a lawyer and on DNA analyses?? It doesn't add up. A helicopter pilot that drinks champagne (and just not any bubbly but Dom Perignon!) when he is on call with a pager on his hip?  Kim is 28 and her mother wants her to get married and have children, but there is "disappointment on  Mom's face" when she learns that the guy Kim is dating isn't a doctor, but a pilot? These characters don't ring true!About the plot: The story starts with Kim finding a human finger in a tin of dog food. Kim, a nurse, decides she has to find out whose finger it is and how it got there so she sets off to Florida where the dog food is manufactured. This is rather weird, but that goes for a lot of stories in this genre, so why not? But then the story loses all credibility: There, on her first night, she just happens to go to a club where she finds out about a person that's missing, and then she just happens to catch the licence plate numbers of some people of interest, she just happens to find the magazines where letters for an anonomous letter were cut out, she just happens to find an old journal and so on, and so on. All these coincidences that kept ocurring made it all so unrealistic that I completely lost interest in the story. Not to mention all the crazy things she does, a dog autopsy, trespassing, stealing the above mentioned journal etc.I believe that in the days of paper novels this book, had it been sent to a publisher, never would have been printed, but that the publisher would have seen  potential in this author and recommended another try with more effort put into making the characters consistent and the plot more credible.