Look For Her by Emily Winslow
My rating: 3/5 cats
3.5 stars CATS for me
dan is correct – this is in no way a horror novel.
but it’s a good suspense/procedural, and if you figured out all the twists, you’re much smarter than me. (even if you didn’t, the odds are good). it’s book 4 of the keene and frohmann series, but it’s not necessary to have read any of the others before you read this one. by which i mean it works fine as a standalone and you won’t be confused if you haven’t read the previous three books, but if you are one of those people who have serious spoiler-allergies, you should know better than to start with book four of a series. pack your epipen.
i’d actually read the first book in this series, The Whole World, about six years ago, without realizing it was going to be kicking off a series. i read it because it had a The Secret History-type plot, and in my memory of it, i liked it more than my review tells me i did. some of my complaints in that review apply to this book, too, but either i’m getting softer in my old ago, or i’m just annoyed by different things these days. like The Whole World, this book is told through a variety of POVs – both keene and frohmann of the series’ name, a therapist, and two of her clients – who appear either through transcripts or are given their own unreliable narrator status. and again, the voices are not always wildly different, but it’s not as though you can’t tell the characters apart. character may take a backseat to story, but winslow does a good job establishing relationships, inner monologues, interests outside of the case at hand, and catching a new reader up on conflicts and cases occurring in previous books.
i thought it was adorable that as part of the author-annotations provided in this pagehabit box, winslow doodled a handy little map of cambridge:
but at one point i found myself wishing for a map of the characters, because i started getting very confused and forgetting the specifics of relationships and connections and who was keeping which secret(s) from whom and who had done what to whom in the past and which character had information some other character really could have used and where all the pieces of the puzzle were headed. part of my confusion is probably down to the fact that my morning commute reading time now occurs at 4 am, which can get a bit bleary, but it actually didn’t mar my enjoyment of the book as much as you would think. by the end, everything made sense, and since disorientation is one of the characteristics of mystery and psych suspense novels, my confusion was 100% in the right spirit.
there are actually a couple of mystery plots here, all resolved, and i enjoyed myself enough to want to go back and read the second and third books in the series, if not enough to run through traffic to get at them.
******************************************
i got another pagehabit horror box!!
i have read the first book in this series/not series, so this should be fun. the box sure is. my addiction to post-it-notes has been tickled, there’s a little rip van winkle to keep my new england upbringing close at hand, plus – cool new bookmarks!
and a hat that announces my predilections to the world
and also makes me look adorable
thank you, box! you are not horrible at all!
