CW: This book is not for anyone who has storm anxiety, PTSD (especially around natural disasters), issues surrounding childhood trauma, or someone with experience in and around Hurricane Katrina
Warnings for on page mention of animal and human death.
Is it literature? A fantastic journey? A hard-boiled police procedural? The story of childhood trauma? This is story, I’m afraid. of a book that tried to do too much, be too many things, and ultimately fell short. However, I do want to add that this book kept me up to read to the end because I wanted to find out what happened. Though I admit it also was out of morbid curiosity to see just everything was going to be resolved–or not–and what facts would be included–or not. My conclusion when I closed my Kindle cover? “Huh? That was….something.”
With three separate mysteries, and two of them not really being mysteries at all, since the characters and the reader knew who had committed the crime, it was more of a matter of reading to see how it all ended. With one mystery solved, but still open-ended, and the other solved in fantastical fashion, the book was left feeling very disjointed and rambling. And it’s not the first in a series, which means there will be no closure here. I admit I rather don’t care, either. Add in supernatural facts, plus the usual ingredients when one is in New Orleans and someone wants to impart the “flavor” and all the research they did, not to mention medical causes and issues from research better left on the editing table, and I can’t really recommend this story. The book really felt like it was trying to do too much, be too many things, and some judicious editing may have been in order here. I liked and was invested in the lead character, but the rest felt like cardboard cut outs playing on too big of a stage.
Book read through Prime Reading
