Review: Interesting and Well-Written Mystery-Suspense
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 6, 2012
This story of Billy Ray Hutchins, a simple and innocent soul living alone and lonely in the mountains of Arkansas until he meets and falls in love with a mysterious young woman named Charlene, is a very interesting and well-written mystery-suspense that also touches on the deeper subjects of mental illness and abuse.  After a chapter or two of getting used to Billy Ray's slangy first-person narration, I really began to appreciate how well this and the author's excellent character development enable the reader to know and sympathize with the uneducated and possibly mentally-handicapped Billy Ray as he struggles to discover the truth about whether or not the woman who has ended his loneliness is a sociopathic liar and murderess as the police believe.  I thought the story's pacing and tone were first-rate, keeping up the suspense and leaving the reader as confused and as desperate as Billy Ray to determine why Charlene has killed the old man across the street and whether her feelings for Billy Ray were ever real or only a cover for a cold-blooded crime.  Also, though the story is predominantly a sad one, revolving as it does around loneliness, deception, mental illness and abuse, it never does become oppressively dark because of its narrator's inherent likability, his kind simplicity that seeks to see the best in someone even when it seems she may not deserve his sympathy, and the hope in the end that, perhaps, Billy Ray's kind-hearted intelligence understands more than those whose higher IQs and education make them more ready to judge.The only two difficulties I had with the novel that made me give a four star rating instead of a five were that, despite very much liking the story's ending, it seemed to be wrapped up a bit too quickly and in a way that didn't seem completely realistic as far as legal proceedings go and that, at least in the Kindle edition, some sort of formatting problem that began to center the text after about Chapter 3 caused some odd paragraph divisions.  Those minor issues aside, it's a novel I'd definitely recommend and I look forward to reading more from this author.