- Started: February 27, 2021
- Finished: February 28, 2021
- Pages: 436
- Fiction
- Rating: 3/5
REVIEW + SUMMARY (SPOILERS INCLUDED)
There are mystery books and there are books where mysteries happen. This was the latter. And truly, it wasn’t even really a mystery to us, the reader, as the murderer is revealed pretty early on as one of the main characters. In fact, it is incredibly obvious as the inside cover decided to describe all the “main” characters – a term I use loosely – except for the one who is a serial killer. It wasn’t a bad book by any means, and I found some of the story lines much more interesting than others, but it was not particularly compelling and I thought the ending to be quite strange and not fitting with the rest of the book.
This book, broken up day by day, starts when a young boy’s body is found in Detroit. Well, the top half of his body. His bottom half is missing and has been replaced with the bottom half of a deer. The book follows the lead detective, Gabriella Versado; her daughter, Layla; a down-on-his-luck transplant journalist, Jonno; a homeless man, TK, and an artist/murder, Clayton Broom. Clayton isn’t really a murderer though, he is compelled by what is described as “The Dream.” I honestly took this to mean he had a tumor that was messing up his brain, something he even offers up as a possible explanation for his erratic behavior. The climax made it seem as though The Dream was something much more real and spurned by the internet. I truly don’t know, it didn’t make any sense to me.
Layla’s chapters were the ones I was most able to get sucked into. She felt like a teenager I could have known; one who is incredibly brash and impulsive one minute and then realizes that they are in over their heads the next. Jonno and TK were just okay and also not even brought up super consistently. That was another strange part of the book; the chapters jumped around from character (which makes sense) but not in any regular sort of way. Like you could almost forget about certain characters. Really TK seemed not that important in the overall plot? Like I said, it wasn’t a bad book but it wasn’t a great one either.
Books and Lewks 