Bad Radio

Really enjoyed this one. Fast-paced, well-edited, gloriously creepy. (And on a shallow note: GORGEOUS cover.) The book has a lot of action, but there is enough time spent on character development to allow readers to connect with the protagonists. The characters, and their interactions with each other, rang true to me; for example, though Abe and Anne obviously care about one another, there is no forced sudden romance.

Great quick read: nothing incredibly dense or mind-bending, just a fun story with intriguing characters and sufficient body horror to make you squirm for days after you've finished the book.

And now that I've lavished the book with praise, I'm going to address the one thing that drove me nuts:

A town of 30,000 people is not a tiny town. It's not even particularly small.

I grew up in the country and the closest town of any size was about 15,000 people. It has a movie theater, grocery store, Wal-Mart Supercenter, Walgreens, two hardware stores, two auto parts stores, five or six motels, one nice hotel with actual suites, and about fifteen restaurants. A town twice that size would not be a “small town” with just a run-down diner and one cheap motel. For that you want a population more like 800 or 1,000.

Small detail that probably wouldn't bother most people at all, but for me it was a glaring case of Did Not Do the Research.