Jen Williams

‘Creepy and compelling’ HARRIET TYCE ‘Brilliant – filled with tension and twists’ SARAH PINBOROUGH ‘An unsettling, terrifying thriller’ ABIGAIL DEAN What if your mother had been writing to a serial killer?

Dog Rose Dirt

JEN. WILLIAMS

Bad Girl Bex

Boring, predictable dreck.

Omigod this was such a boring book. The only reason I bothered reading it all the way to the end was so that I could a/ say yes I was right and saw the "big reveal" coming a mile off and, b/ wouldn't have people telling me that "if you'd just read it to the end, you'd see it got so much better!"

Because it didn't. Honestly, this was a slog. And not because I'm some ADD halfwit, with zero attention span. I'm a big girl; long books in and of themselves, don't faze me. But this? WHY was it 400 pages long? 400 pages of long, meandering tosh, with obvious foreshadowing, a stupidly unbelievable conclusion and the whole thing made almost unbearable by the main character who managed to be 2-dimension and sort of nebulous, as well utterly vile all at the same time. 

I don't know what it is with female authors who desperately want to create some kind of "kick-ass-feminist heroine" but ultimately end up writing about an insufferable bitch who thinks that being an arse to people is a personality trait. Of COURSE she has to shag the police officer in the story...why WOULDN'T he be super-attracted to a moody harridan who drinks too much? What a score! Not that it matters, because that bit really doesn't go anywhere. It just serves to make us see what an absolute arse the main character is, and what a silly, gullible man the police officer is (aren't they always in these books?)

The storyline is totally stupid, the way the police just let her have so much access to a convicted serial killer and the obligatory-shag officer's willingness to just tell her so much sensitive information about serious crimes, was laughably unbelievable. Certain characters were just invented briefly to provide other also-not-fleshed-out-vague-boring characters with a reason to be somewhere else at exactly the right time. And then another "twist" lumped in at the end to REALLY annoy the reader, because their existence was what the entire plot really hung on, yet we only got a multi-page, info-dump of exposition right at the end to explain everything.

Just such a total pile of crap. A massive waste of my time and energy. Who do I recommend this to? Absolutely nobody. Go read literally ANYTHING else. This is dog shit and life is too short. I read this so you don't have to. This writer is awful and her book is trash.

Dog Rose Dirt

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