The Mystery Starts Here

This is the first published novel by this author, and it shows. Just the basics of writing would have told me this if I hadn’t read it in the blurb. It’s narrated from the POV of Sean O’Brian, a retired Miami Homicide cop and….he’s perfect! How annoying is that? Very. He finds the body of a young woman barely alive, who later dies at the hospital. Sean vows he’ll find the killer! He finds clues near her body that ALL the local cops missed! He carries little zip lock baggies to collect evidence, then shoots it the the locals for analysis. Only problem is a little thing call chain of evidence! Everything he collected would have been tossed out of court! He’s not a cop, he’s a civilian and can in no way prove where he got the stuff!

He got a lot of the forensics wrong and there’s no excuse for that. There are many good books on the subject or – call the local cops and ask questions! That’s what good writers do. He had the lab processing DNA in a few hours or days – we wish. At one point he told the cops (yeah, he did that a lot) to Luminol a building and if they find blood, type if for DNA to see if it matches one of the victims! I don’t think so – can you say contamination? He found leaves in three locations and, yes, sent them to the lab for DNA. Yes, you can get DNA form plants but…there was NO proof where he picked them up! That pesky chain of evidence thing again. One of the characters is VERY rich – but has cataracts! WHY? No one in this day and age goes blind from catarats – they are routinely removed with little trouble.  He found a TRAILER where underage illegals were being kept, went inside and found it had been partition off into separate rooms! HUH? Has Lowe ever BEEN in a trailer? No room, dude. Also, one of the girls tells him they get $500 a night when going to see men in hotels!!! They are dirty, illiterate and probably diseased! Yuck, I doubt that one, too.

He makes the very common first novelist mistake of having his character names too similar. Leslie and Lauren, Dave and Dan….very confusing. Most of the novel is from Sean’s POV – except for about six-eight pages near the end! He switches to the killer’s POV to get in some information that Sean couldn’t know (but of course he figures it out with NO evidence what-so-ever). Then he’s back in Sean’s POV again. The more I got into the book, the more I found myself saying, “Oh, Pleeze!”

I could go on and on about the myriad of mistakes but there are too many books to read. Lowe can write. Let’s just hope he does a better job with his next book and is more believable. I did like his dog, Max, though.

Okay, I gotta ask – are some author’s paid by the word? Because that’s the ONLY justification I can think of for this long, boring book! I should have known better. I’ve read, I think, two other books by this author and both were ruined by overwriting. Matter of fact, I think I only read one and gave up on the second – no matter.

Staub has good ideas but her writing suffers from too much introspection and too many sub-plots. She introduces new characters right up until the end of the book and has a lot of loose threads that never get resolved. That drives me nuts. The ONLY way I managed to read this book was by skimming over half of it. It’s 416 pages long and would have been much better and more interesting at about 350.

Okay, the basic plot is all her adult life, a woman has visions of children in peril. She thinks she’s crazy so ignores the visions and tells no one. Eventually she has a vision of her own, fourteen-year-old daughter and of course, part of it comes true.

I have to tell you, I hated the protagonist, Camden (call me Cam) Hastings. Her husband walked out on her after 20 years of marriage because of her drinking, then she finds out she’s pregnant, so stops, but….she can never find the right time to tell her hubby! HUH? “Hello, husband? I’m pregnant, we need to talk.” There, see, that wasn’t so hard. She’s clingy and whiny and totally unlikable. She was raised from a very early age by a single father and should have been stronger and had more backbone! I didn’t much care the Mike, the husband either. He walked out on her because of her drinking but…never actually said anything to her! Nice. Maybe you could try to help her?

Throughout the book we have lots of psychic crap, visions, unrequited love, blah, blah, blah. It’s too bad because the basic idea was good but the author or her editor needs to learn to cut, cut CUT! Never again a Wendy Corsi Staub book, I swear!

If you want a fun, fast-pased book with little introspection and a good plot, pick up a copy of my latest romance, Call Sign: Love at www.writewordsinc.com. It was the number ONE bestseller on Fictionwise for August, 2009!