(I received a free advance copy of this book in exchange for a review).
I have to admit, this book was very easy to read. It only took me a few hours to get through the whole thing…and the blurb had sounded really interesting. And I did find it quite easy to care about Amy as a character.
Unfortunately, the secondary characters in this book didn’t feel nearly as strong. I didn’t like the fact that all of the men were obsessed with Amy, and that all of the women (with one exception) seemed to hate/be insanely jealous of her. Even the parts of the book not written from Amy’s third person perspective basically had her be the main focus of everyone else’s world.
I think the two police officers could have been really interesting, but with the way that both were trying to warp the narrative (Brandon trying to make it fit Amy being innocent; Mindy trying to make the evidence fit Amy being the culprit). I also found the narration really hard to take seriously when one of the characters was written as literally ‘shaking her booty’. Unfortunately, that threw me straight out of the story and it took me a little while to be able to get back into it again.
Learning about Amy’s past gradually, through the course of the book, rather than all at once worked really well. I did feel bad about what she was going through and what she had gone through…and when it seemed like she’d found someone who would treat her well in the past, I was happy for her, despite knowing things were going to go very badly wrong.
I did figure out the truth behind the ‘friend’ who was messaging Amy fairly early on, although it was still good to see how the events unfolded in any case. And I did like how much Amy ended up second-guessing herself through the book. If there wasn’t the weird, obsessive, instant!love connection (at least on Brandon’s end), I would have liked reading the interactions between Amy and Brandon…although Brandon did seem to pick up a bit by the end of the book. Throughout most of the book, it was easy to suspend my disbelief, even though certain things that happened were a bit weird.
On the whole, this book was easy to read. I would recommend giving it a try if you enjoy reading thrillers and mysteries. Despite the issues I had with the secondary characters, I did keep reading to find out what would happen by the end. I wouldn’t read it a second time, but I think it was worth reading once.
Ink of Blood 