At first glance this is exactly my type of book, but alas, it just didn't live up to the expectations I had of it.
It is a good story; interesting and it kept me guessing as to who murdered the beautiful Zena. it also has a certain amount of tension which made me want to keep reading. The characters are good - rounded and believable on the whole.
So, some real positives - what's the problem?
Carmen.
If she changed her mind once about whether she should or shouldn't stay with Tom, she did it a hundred times. I mean, for goodness sake, just make a decision. First she trusted him, then in the next paragraph she could never trust him - honestly it was constant. I don't believe that if you had evidence that someone had killed a person, you'd just sit back and do nothing. If I even suspected for a minute that my husband was a violent killer, I am pretty sure that I wouldn't hang around waiting for me to be his next target.
Then there's the writing, and I say this admitting fully (as I have done before), that it's better than anything I could produce I'm sure. It started off okay, but then, probably around half-way through, it just seemed to lose its way. I had to re-read huge chunks of it because I'd completely lost what was happening. It jumped endlessly from one time-frame to another. They were eating, then in the next breath it was a day later - the structure was all over the place. Whole phrases were repeated, as were words in the same sentence; it felt at times like it was just being padded out, and at others, dare I say it, like a story I'd mark when I was teaching. It was almost as if the writer had had a brilliant idea for a story, but was then unsure as to how to mould it into a novel rather than a novella or short story. And yes, I am aware how rude that all sounds!
Having said all that negative, I will say that at no point did I want to stop reading. I did want to know who the murderer was, and I hadn't guessed before the big reveal, so of course that is a big positive.
So I'll end pretty much how I began; it disappointed rather than delighted I'm sorry to say.
