Review: Rushed to publish? This book needed a couple more edits.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 27, 2013
I wish DeLeon had worked this book a little longer. I'm don't know if she has a critique circle or a published author to give her advice. The book had some promise, but did not live up to it. She needed to put this through a couple more writings and add some depth and tidy up some plot points and it would have been a much better read.Normally I don't read Harlequins, but this one looked good. I found myself wading through amateur hour. The characters are not given a real character arc. Holt has more baggage than Heathrow. His father and grandfather were walking sperm banks and he's got half siblings and aunts and uncles all over. Alex can't possibly be a psychiatrist. She's an angst ridden mess. Real psychiatrists must themselves go through psychoanalysis before they are licensed. She's haunted by a terrifying scene she witnessed as a child. That is the entire summation of her character. Paper dolls have more nuance. And she always fixes things for her neurotic cousin. The cousin's child is kidnapped, her estranged husband is missing presumed to have taken the kid. He turns up dead, alligator chow. The misdirection in this plot is about as subtle as a neon arrow.There is a group of bad guys with tattoos that Holt recognizes, they apparently are evil doers in a Louisiana bayou town named after the African practice, vodoun, or voodoo. Puleeze couldn't someone council DeLeon the town name was hyper-cheesy?A child is kidnapped, echoing child kidnappings from 30 years earlier. Holt's father was killed when Holt was a boy, by a stranger with an eye tattoo on his arm.Nothing ever becomes of the tattoo clue. There are plot points never answered, that alone ticks me off. It means the author is shilling for the following book, where you might get the answers to questions from this book. I'm not buying the next one because I consider that a cheap trick. A book like this should be a stand-alone and if the subsequent books in the series carry on that theme, fine and dandy.The final straw: No explanation for mass bird die-offs. Ravens clunking from the sky deader than hammers, all part of the supposed black magic. But when the magic is explained, the dead ravens weren't. The book had promise the writer didn't fulfill.Nobody seemed to help this poor woman with continuity, plotting and character arcs. Was she writing in a vacuum?