If ever there was a book I should have thrown at the wall this was it. I was reading it for a mailing list discussion and didn’t want to miss out on the discussion so I skim read most of it. More comments to follow…here there are, with spoilers

first impressions

My first impressions were that I didn’t like the writer and this made me not like the characters too. I haven’t finished the book and I’m not sure I will, I’m waiting for some one here to hurry up and give the end away so I don’t feel I have to read on!

I didn’t like Gale much but I think this is mostly explained by the fact that I found the prologue to be difficult to read and to understand what was going on. I quite liked Lisa to start with and thought she was the most three dimensional of the characters, that’s one thing I did think the author did well, setting her up to be likable and then revealing another side to her as the story unfolded.

I don’t really remember the other characters making an impression on me before the murder.

I found it a really hard book to get into and I found the local people using American idioms to be really annoying, I did think the writer had tried hard to get the locality right but there were too many little things that pulled me out of the story. I had to imagine the book was set in some alternate Hampshire somewhere in the mid-Atlantic to get anywhere with it and even then I skim read a lot of it.