No Simple Death

I'm a bit tight fisted with the stars, must admit. But I think it's a hard task to write a good thriller. It has to have interesting characters, or else you start thinking it's far fetched and blah blah (of course it is, it is fiction; but if the characters feel real, you believe everything else does too). It has to have a good balance of guessing and finding out - if you know everything on the first page you underestimate the author, and if it's too out of the blue you think it's a patchy job. It must have a good rhythm, because all the guessing is a bit tiresome.
So this one fell a bit flat overall. The main idea seems just fine, but I felt like the author overdid it a bit just to throw us in a mess, and the main characters didn't do the saving job (the detective was cute, but the heroine, uf... either she didn't have a shower - not even kidding - or she was ‘so beautiful it drew eyes'; either she was a romantic and believed all the crap or she was the one making calls to the detective; either she had to make a living or she was rich. It seems that it was all out for my own choice. I choose to hate her.