Ms. Tammy

I am on vacation, and I was looking for a domestic thriller to lose myself in for a little while. I read the reviews for this book and was excited to read it. I started out listening to the audio but switched to the printed format to pay better attention. After finishing this book, I wished I had stuck with the audio version because at least that one was free. This book's premise is that an unreliable narrator is trying to find out why she ended up in a hospital in a coma. We go back and forth through time as the character tries to figure out what happened. The author accomplishes this by telling the story in the present, the recent past, and the not so recent past. The not so recent past is relayed to us through a series of journal entries. This would not have been so bad, but then we find out that the character's sister writes the journal entries. So as you can imagine, this flips the whole narrative on its head. Not only do we have an unreliable narrator, but we also have a crazy one who, as an adult, is still engaging with a childhood imaginary friend. If this isn't enough, we have some sort of subplot happening that a jilted college lover is stalking our main character from almost two decades ago. It really is all too much. The plot is unbelievable, and the storytelling is way too convoluted, and this author is pretentious and thinks way too highly of their writing abilities. I still rate the book a solid three stars because the sheer ridiculousness of it kept me inside my hotel room all day long.

Indelible book #4 in the Grant County series has been my least favorite. In Karen Slaughter's style, the book opens up, and almost immediately, we are thrust into the action when armed bandits invade the police station of Grant County. She takes us on a journey to the past, explaining how Jefferey and Sara's love story began. I didn't find it much of a love story. Jefferey is the town playboy and a reformed bad boy. It is almost annoying because it is a trope of the good girl falling in love with the bad boy.