(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review).
(This review may contain spoilers).
I’ve wavered a little about how many stars to give this book. It has three stars because, although it grabbed me and tugged me into the storyline, I did feel that there was an awful lot of summarising in this book.
The blurb of the book sounded really intriguing. I like thrillers and this book promised to be really intense to read. In many ways, it was. It pulled me into the world and I could relate well to Charlotte, being a budding writer myself.
The biggest problem I had was the fact that I couldn’t figure out exactly how the FBI had missed what was apparently so obvious to Charlotte. I think that’s something that could be shown as believable… but it wasn’t explored in such a way that it should have been.
Towards the beginning, I found Charlotte really easy to identify with. There were a couple of things she came out with that made me smile… and it was good to see the original trigger, when she was a child, of how she came to be researching the murders as an adult.
I had a lot of trouble with the suspects that Charlotte had. I think my biggest problem was the fact that she could apparently just look at all of the information about the FBI agents really easily. Although knowing about the agents would be easier than, say, accessing their restricted files, I’m not sure it would be that easy to go to a random spot and access all of the information about the agents.
I found it interesting to see how Charlotte felt about the girls. I was a bit confused about the dreams she had and whether they were supposed to be supernatural, or just her mind figuring things out. I did think that her dreaming about the murders because she was so close to them made sense, though.
Apart from Charlotte, I felt a lot of the characters came across as quite one-dimensional. There didn’t seem to be much time spent developing them, or their relationship to Charlotte.
This book was really quite intense to read and it kept my attention really well throughout. That having been said, this book did read more like a summary than an actual novel. I don’t think I’d read any more books in the series unless they had a lot of editing go into them.
Ink of Blood 