Jennifer Hillier

Inheriting his childhood home in Seattle from the retired police chief grandfather who hunted down a serial killer decades earlier, Matt, an up-and-coming restaurateur, makes a grisly discovery about his girlfriend's mother that reveals terrible truths about the past.

The Butcher

Alexis Donahue

Decent read… one plot twist was incredibly shocking although I kind of guessed it earlier in the book. Definitely look up trigger warnings prior to reading but otherwise, average thriller IMO.

"Thirty years ago, police chief Edward Shank hunted down and killed the most notorious serial killer in Seattle's history: the Beacon Hill Butcher. Now, eighty years old and retired, Edward is giving up his Victorian home to his grandson Matt, an aspiring chef. While Matt is renovating it, he stumbles upon a gruesome cache. Matt must decide whether he should ignore the sinister secret, go to the police, or take matters into his own hands. And his family's past is feeding disturbing changes in himself as well... Sam, his girlfriend, believes that her mother may have been killed by the Beacon Hill Butcher - even though the murder took place two years after Edward Shank gunned down the killer. But Sam's search is bringing her too close to the truth... and right into the path of Matt's terrible secret"-- Back cover.

Cheri Fuller

Normally I wouldn't review a book I didn't finish but I'm making an exception for this one. There are a few reasons for this. First, right before I started this book, I read and loved Jennifer Hillier's new book, Jar of Hearts, and I don't want readers to miss out on that one because of this one. Second, I was given the book by the publisher and NetGalley for an honest review and I feel that I've read enough of this to do that. Third, there are things that were done with this book that the author either got better at or had a better, stronger editor so didn't show up in her new work. This book is a few years old and a writer can grow a lot in that amount of time.

I really liked the premise: very bad cop who everyone thinks is a hero is really a monster and has been discovered by a few people. Unfortunately, that's really all I can say that I liked. 

The writing is very clunky with the same phrases being used over and over again - one of my pet peeves. The whole "if X noticed/saw/heard/etc, they didn't show it" thing. Once or twice, maybe ok but to use that phrase every time to show that a non-POV character may or may not have noticed/saw/heard/etc is not cool. And, please, for the love of all that's holy, stop using characteristics in dialogue tags or in action descriptions. "The older woman" shouldn't be used at least ten times in a single scene to describe a woman whose name is known. It's crazy annoying.

Between the stuff that shouldn't have made it out of editing and my absolute rage with anything Matt related because he was so over the top, I had to stop. I didn't find anything enjoyable about this book. 

Instead of reading the provided ebook, I listened to the audio book but that only made the bad experience worse. I didn't care for the narrator's character voices, his intonation, anything. It was honestly just a bad experience for me. 

But don't let this review stop you from reading Jar of Hearts because that book rocks. I'm very happy that the author has grown so much and look forward to reading her future books.

The Butcher

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