Review: The Next One to Fall by Hilary Davidson

The Next One to Fall
by Hilary Davidson
Release Date: February 14th, 2012
2012 Tor Books
Hardcover Edition; 352 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2698-0
ASIN: B005N8YQAO
Genre: Fiction / Mystery
Source: Review Copy from Publisher

3 Stars

Summary
Travel writer Lily Moore has been persuaded by her closest friend, photographer Jesse Robb, to visit Peru with him. Jesse is convinced that the trip will lure Lily out of her dark mood, but Lily is haunted by betrayal and loss. At Machu Picchu, the famous Lost City of the Incas, they discover a woman clinging to life at the bottom of an ancient stone staircase. Just before the woman dies, she tells Lily the name of the man who pushed her.

When the local police investigate, the forensic evidence they find doesn’t match what Lily knows. Unable to accept the official ruling of accidental death, Lily hunts down the wealthy man who was the dead woman’s traveling companion and discovers a pattern of dead and missing women in his wake.

Obsessed with getting justice for these women, Lily sets in motion a violent chain of events that will have devastating consequences.

My Thoughts
The Next One to Fall is one of those mystery novels that I really enjoyed for its beautiful and rich descriptions of Peru, in particular Machu Picchu, but is not one that I would necessarily recommend for its suspense or mystery.  And after reading the first one in this series, The Damage Done, having enjoyed it quite a bit, I was somewhat let down after finishing this one.

First of all, I will give Ms. Davidson full credit for setting her mystery in a very unique and interesting part of the world.  I have been wanting to visit Machu Picchu for a very long time now and after reading this, it has only moved that longing to the near-top of a very long bucket list.  I truly enjoyed the descriptions of the area and the people and would have liked to have learned much more. That being said, I wish more depth had gone into some of the areas discuseed as I felt like only the tip had been mentioned, such as the flourishing drug trade, but then the whole topic kind of petered out and I was left feeling as if it just wasn't interesting or necessary to the story and just dropped.  It made the novel feel incomplete for me and I was left wondering why it was mentioned in the first place.  And there seemed to be a lot of this hodge-podge material in the novel.

And while there could have been some very interesting character development in this story, this was never quite achieved with either the primary or secondary characters, expect for maybe Detective Vargas, whom I liked the most as I found I empathized with his situation.  Truly, I would have found Lily Moore difficult to deal with as well and there were times when she annoyed me tremendously.  I just had a hard time connecting to her and some of the things she did seemed so out of line for an experienced travel writer.  I totally understand her concern for someone else, but I did not buy into the fact that an experienced travel writer and an experienced photojournalist would be all that interested in getting involved in a murder in a foreign country. 

While the novel started off interestingly enough, I think the various convolutions and twists sort of got away from the author and it became a bit messy.  It also became less and less believable and I was in shock when I got towards the end; it just caught me off guard and I felt like I was in a reality show.  I just didn't feel like it was believable and I was somewhat let down by that.  I also didn't know what to think by that ending.  I wish I could explain a bit more, folks, but I would give away important plot points and I don't want to do that either.

Verdict
The Next One to Fall was somewhat of a disappointment in comparison to The Damage Done.  I found the plot to be too cliched for me to be believable and I didn't buy into it this time around.  Despite all this, I really did enjoy the first novel and would like to read the next novel in this series to see if maybe this one was a fluke and Ms. Davidson will return to her stellar form in Evil in All its Disguises.

Review: The Night Season by Chelsea Cain

The Night Season (Book 4, Archie Sheridan Series)
by Chelsea Cain
Release Date: March 1st, 2011
2011 Minotaur Books
Hardcover Edition; 336 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-312-61976-3
Genre: Fiction / Suspense / Murder / Mystery
Source:  Review Copy Provided by Anna Suknov

3.5 / 5 Stars

Summary
With the Beauty Killer Gretchen Lowell locked away behind bars once again, Archie Sheradan - a Portland police detective and nearly one of her victims - can finally rest a little easier. Meanwhile, the rest of the city of Portland is in crisis.  Heavy rains have flooded the Willamette River, and several people have drowned in the quickly rising waters.  Or at least that's what they thought until the medical examiner discovers that the latest victim didn't drown: She was poisoned before she went into the water.  Soon, Portland has a new serial killer on its hands, and Archie and his task force have a new case.

My Thoughts
What I found really difficult with this novel is that it came on the heels of the highly intense and immensely satisfying Gretchen Lowell novels and I had a hard time reconciling the fact that the lovely and extremely dangerous Gretchen was no longer to play a part in this novel.   While The Night Season was interesting, it just didn't seem to have that same intensity and 'punch' that was in the previous novels.

Archie Sheridan has several major problems with which to deal in this novel:  the rising flood waters that were overtaking Portland, a mysterious serial killer who was taking out his victims a most unusual method, the disappearance of a nine-year-old boy, the finding of a body on a carousel in a local amusement park, and the discovery of a sixty-year-old skeleton.  I found the setting of the novel to be fascinating as the constant rain and the floodwaters made for some dark and eerie backgrounds and has a way of making events seem even more macabre than they are.  The characters spend much of their time in wet clothes, being rescued from the river or some such area, or having to deal with situations and events that take place in areas that are flooded or are in danger of being flooded. 

Archie is back to work, clean and fairly healthy, having spent a considerable amount of time in the hospital dealing with the after-effects of his time with Gretchen.  I enjoyed this aspect of the novel, learning how he is coping with the events in the previous novels, and how it has affected his relationships.  I adore Archie and want him to succeed in every aspect of his life.  We also see much more of Susan Ward in this novel, a wacky reporter who always seems to be around when things happen.  Susan kind of drives me nuts because she seems to lack a total sense of preservation and common sense at times, as one particular scene will show you very clearly, and walked into danger that was just screaming with warnings.  I just wanted to shake her silly more than once.  I really don't know what to think of her and will wait to reserve judgment in future novels.

I do have to say that the plot did not pack the intensity that the previous novels in this series did.  In fact, it really seemed to play a background role to the rains and floods that were occurring and I did not find it as interesting as the flooding scenarios.  The method the serial killer used to kill his victims seemed interesting, but I felt the author was reaching a little to try to make it interesting when really, a needle would have done the same thing.  The language and the writing style were, as usual, great, and Ms. Cain has a way of drawing you into the events, and into the characters, so that you have difficulty putting the novel down, despite the lack of intensity in the plot. 

Verdict
The Night Season was still an interesting and fascinating read.  Despite the lack of intensity, perhaps marred because I enjoyed her previous three novels so much, I still enjoyed this novel and found it engrossing because Ms. Cain's writing style just wraps you in the story and in the characters.  The novel works because the police and National Guard procedures are interesting, the setting is dark and foreboding, and the flooding scenes are fascinating. 

Review: Last Exit in New Jersey by C.E. Grundler

Last Exit in New Jersey (Kindle Edition)
by C.E. Grundler
Release Date: October 19, 2010
Size: 615 KB
Language: English
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Source: Review Copy from Author

4 / 5 Stars

Summary
Nice young ladies from the Garden State really shouldn't be dumping bodies at sea. Then again, 20 year-old Hazel Moran is anything but your typical Jersey girl. Raised aboard a schooner and riding shotgun beside her father in their old tractor-trailer truck, there's little on the road or water that she can't handle; it's her people skills that need work. But when Hazel and her father become the targets of some unsavory characters hunting for her blue-haired cousin, their stolen tractor-trailer truck and a delivery that never arrived, she knows it's time to heed the lessons learned from her favorite hardboiled paperbacks: playing nice will only end in tears.


It'll take all her ingenuity, not to mention some fishing tackle and high voltage, if Hazel hopes to protect her family and unravel this tangle of greed and betrayal. And anyone who gets too close, no matter their intent, will discover just how vulnerable - or potentially dangerous - shy little Hazel truly is as she sets in motion a twisted plan to uncover the truth, settle some scores, and if possible not wind up dead in the process.

My Thoughts
I have never had a problem reviewing self-published works, but like everyone, have read works that have ranged from the banal to the really good.  I have to say that Last Exit in New Jersey is a great example of how self-publication does not have to be poorly done.  This novel had me hooked right from the beginning and pretty much did not let go until the very end.

Hazel is an amazing character and I loved her.  She is brash, courageous, determined, and deceptively lethal.  I loved her fierce determination to protect her family no matter the cost, and yet, there was a vulnerability to her that I found endearing.  She was like a tornado and whenever she was around, chaos and destruction seemed to follow her everywhere, but it was so much fun to read.  Hazel had no idea whom to trust, and because you are following her story, you had no idea who to trust either, and as the story twisted and turned around the various facts and suppositions, it left you unsure, wondering exactly what was going on.  It wasn't until about halfway through the book that I started getting an idea as to what was really happening and I loved that about this book. 

Basically the story revolved around two main storylines: First of all, you had all of the issues surrounding the disappearance of Hazel's cousin Micah and the attack on Hazel on her boat.  Hazel's concern for her cousin supercedes everything in her life and what has her disobeying everyone around her and creating this constant chaos and destruction; she just doesn't listen to what anyone tells her and constantly gets herself in trouble because of it.  The other question surrounds Hammon and his girlfriend Annabel and how they relate to the story.  Naturally, the two stories are interconnected and you spend the entire novel trying to figure out how.  Trying to decide who is the bad guy and who is the good guy keeps the reader on edge throughout the entire novel.  Ms. Grundler does a fantastic job keeping the reader guessing as to who is the villain, and I spent a large portion of the novel not really knowing who exactly it was, which was a large part of the suspense.   
 
This story has everything you could want in a thriller;  it has romance, mystery, intrigue, suspense, action, drama, and a lot of dark humour, which I loved.  I can't say the characters were normal, as Hazel was somewhat psychotic, and Hammon was beyond weird, but they grow on you and it's what makes them so much fun to read about.  Furthermore, they are completely believable in their own way.  And Ms. Grundler has a style to her writing that makes you feel a connection to the characters, that allows you to understand them, even if you don't necessarily understand their actions or their drives and desires.  And Hazel is the type of female character, building booby traps, driving during car chases, being skillful with a knife, that I like to see in females, not the squeamish females that we often see in novels who faint when anything goes wrong.  It's nice to see tough, strong female characters who can handle themselves well.

While I truly enjoyed the action in this novel, I felt that maybe there was a little too much and the reader wasn't given enough 'down time' to catch their breath.  I don't think it's always necessary to throw every single type of action in a novel in order to catch a reader's attention.  Ms. Grundler has a deft writing style, which left on its own, can easily catch the reader's attention without having to constantly throw action scenes at the reader.  There is a saying that too much of a good thing is too much.

Verdict
I really enjoyed this novel and Ms. Grundler had no problem capturing my interest from beginning to end.  There were a lot of twists and turns in this novel, which kept me guessing the true nature of the villain, and some surprises too.  The action scenes were deftly interwoven into the romantic scenes and I truly enjoyed Ms. Grundler's literary voice.  I am looking forward to reading more novels from this author.