More Books than Time

Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

The Knowing by Ninie Hammon Supernatural Suspense With a Bang

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I was skeptical when I read author Ninie Hammon’s description of her novel The Knowing,  it will “grab you in a reality so gripping you’ll decide you can fold the towels later and the lawn will still be out there to mow tomorrow”.  About 50 pages in I realized it was way past bedtime and 50 pages more finally decided to put it down.  It truly is that good.

The author describes it as supernatural spiritual warfare, or a paranormal thriller with a backstory that depends on “scriptural realities, though, that most Christians say they believe–but really don’t”, dealing with demons, hell, foolish and evil people that knowingly invite in the devil.  Despite this there is no religion in it, no preaching, no reason that non-believers won’t enjoy the story and characters.

Characters

Jack is a cop called in to stop a school massacre.  Daniel is a Protestant pastor who lost his belief but has his wife and daughter to care for.  Theresa is an older lady, a crossing guard, whose husband died in the school shooting.  These three struggle to understand what is happening to them, what happened about 20 years before when Jack and Daniel were 14 and best friends, what the evil is that threatens them and their families.

Author Hammond makes her people so real that you feel as if you know them.  She lets us into their hearts and minds as we ride along, as bewildered and over matched as they feel.  She builds sub plots, such as Daniel’s wife’s infidelity and Daniel’s struggle to understand his faith and its loss.

The bad guys are believable too, what appear to be normal (more or less) guys driven by demons.  Hammond shows us what happens today and what happened 20 years before, and we see pain and fear and misery, that Jack and Daniel and the mystery girl Becca.  Now the demons are back and want to pick up where they left off.

Be Aware

The bad guys are racist and cruel.  Know going in you will hear some disgusting terms for people and animal cruelty.  Several characters have horrible grammar; don’t use this book as a guide to the English language.

The Knowing: Book One launches a series, total book count unknown.  You can read this as a standalone novel as it has a beginning, middle and end, but it’s easy to see where Book 2 will start.

I’ve not read anything by this author before and am fast changing that.  She is exceptionally strong at building characters that are people and fast moving plots.  Five Stars.

Renovating for Fun and Profit – Bricking It by Nick Spalding

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Have you ever built a house or done a major remodel?  Do you enjoy This Old House and similar house makeover shows?  Do you like a funny book?  Then get a copy of Bricking It by Nick Spalding and get ready to relive your shudders and that horrible feeling as the costs creep ever up.

Danny and Haley Daley inherited a derelict farmhouse deep in the Hampshire countryside from their grandmother.  (Their parents got cash.)  The house had woodworm, critters, critter droppings, mold, sagging walls and floors, an attic floor that’s so rotted Danny falls through, plus the to-be-expected damaged kitchen, bath, subsiding foundations, overgrown shrubbery, and so on.  Neither has any money or any home Do-It-Yourself skills.

But…  Haley found from the local realtor that the house would sell as-is for about 160,000 pounds or – get this – if renovated for about 600,000 pounds.  They could expect to pay about 160,000 pounds for the renovation work (and we who have been through this know that will inevitably increase), but they stand to make over 300,000 pounds when selling the house.  That’s a big amount, enough to make anyone reconsider.

They agree to proceed.  Bricking It is not This Old House or Rehab Addict in written form and it doesn’t cover all the work hammer nail by hammer nail.  Instead it touches on what Danny and Haley do and feel.  Some of the vignettes are pretty funny as when Danny burns a bunch of big green weeds in the back corner and gets high on the marijuana smoke; some are gross as when Danny has an internal emergency while up in the rafters; some are fun as when Haley realizes she is more concerned with her house than with the bomb disposal squad that’s removing the WW2 bomb in the yard.

Overall the book does a reasonable job on characterization, both Danny and Haley grow and manage to get out of nasty personal ruts.  Danny even discovers that a girl’s beautiful outside doesn’t make up for a boring inside!  Spalding does  good job on minor characters like Gerard who is filming this as part of a British home improvement show, Fred the contractor and of course Pat The Cow.

It does not capture the horrible feeling one gets when trapped in a sea of construction debris and debt; instead the characters and episodes are positive and the ending is a bit over the top.  I didn’t care for the coarse language and potty humor – there is plenty of ordinary humor in any building project that Spalding didn’t need a couple of the potty events – but discovering their grandmother had run a brothel for a few years was priceless.

Overall I’d give this 4 stars. Bricking It is easy to read and rather fun.  I didn’t enjoy it enough to look for more by Spalding but this was worth reading if you have a couple spare hours – and are considering whether to remodel or just tear it down and move.

I got a copy of Bricking It for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Missing Pieces – Suspense and Family Drama – Heather Gudenkauf

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Suspense and mystery novels aren’t my favorites but every once in a while one catches my eye. Recently NetGalley offered Missing Pieces, a “chilling page-turner” from Heather Gudenkauf.  Well!  That sounded too good to pass up.

The book seemed reasonably decent, but I couldn’t get into it, just lost interest.  I gave it up after about 25% and flipped to the back to find my theory as to the villain was completely wrong.

I think if you enjoy suspense and family mysteries you would like this.  The writing was good and the setting, a small town in Iowa with family secrets, was intriguing.  Perhaps had I stuck with it I may have enjoyed following the lead character, Sarah Quinlan, as she delves deeper into her husband’s past and family secrets.  But maybe not.

I’m going to give this 3 stars on NetGalley because it would be a good read for those who enjoy the suspense / mystery genre.

Home by Matt Dunn, Book Review

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Home, by Matt Dunn, is one of those perfectly decent books that just misses.  This may be me and my tastes instead of the book itself as I was unable to get past the first couple pages of another book by Mr. Dunn, The Ex-Boyfriend’s Handbook.  I probably wouldn’t have finished Home either, except it came from Net Galley for a review.

There is nothing wrong with Home.  The writing is decent, main characters are well-done, setting is interesting, and the plot uses a universal conflict.

The primary story concerns Josh, who left the sad seaside town of Derton at 18 to pursue college and dreams of writing, plus his parents, his best friend, his former and almost-former girlfriends and his old high school nemesis.  Josh’s dad is dying of lung cancer and Josh has left London to come home, fully intending to stay a week or so then return to the bright lights and his advertising job.

While in Derton Josh breaks up with his current girl friend (we all cheer at this point), he loses his job, finds the girl he dumped at 18, realizes he should have stayed with her.  Eventually it works out but the process is a bit tedious.

Josh doesn’t believe in anything except that he doesn’t want to live in Derton.  That has driven him for 18 years, but a desire to flee is not a desire to live, and being against something doesn’t tell you what you are for.  He doesn’t like the superficial glitter that his girlfriend and boss embody (best line in the book describes his girlfriend’s closet as a “shrine to Jimmy Choo”), but he doesn’t know what to replace it with.

Josh stumbles around the emotional minefield of his dad’s illness and death, his fears and loneliness.  It takes him the full novel to do what we readers on page 3 see is the right course.

Overall I’d give this a solid 3 stars but don’t read it if you don’t like books where people are their own worst enemies.

 

The Santa Klaus Murder – English Country Home Mystery

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If P. G. Wodehouse had written murder mysteries, they may have read like The Santa Klaus Murder), except without the ongoing humor and deft dialogue we hear from Jeeves and Bertie.  The The Santa Klaus Murder is set in an English country home during the annual and dreaded Christmas family visit of the Melbury clan to Flaxmere.

The Melbury family includes four grownup children, three daughters and one son, the unmarried older aunt, two invited guests (one the fiance of the only unmarried daughter), the secretary and assorted servants and the patriarch, Sir Osmond.  Sir Osmond is rich and capricious, wanting his children and grandchildren to do as he wants.  He is considering changes to his will to leave more to his secretary and one granddaughter but has consistently refused to discuss his intentions with anyone in the family so none of the children knows who is in line to get what.

The older children are afraid the secretary, Miss Portisham, may have undue influence over Sir Osmond, perhaps beguiling him into marriage or at least a substantial bequest.  The youngest daughter, Jennifer, wants to marry Philip Cheriton but her father insists she remain at home, unwed, to care for him and of course her siblings all favor this too, thinking she would be a counterweight to Miss Portisham.

Someone shoots Sir Osmond while the grandchildren are playing with their gifts and enjoying the crackers (small firecrackers).  Colonel Halstock, head of the local police, then arrives to solve the mystery.

This novel is from the Poisoned Pen Press, released as part of their British Library Crime Classics, and is a fun, enjoyable diversion.  (The Santa Klaus Murder was originally published in 1936.)  

Author Mavis Doriel Hay does a nice job weaving in the family skeletons and dissensions by having Colonel Halstock interview each of the family and the lead servants.  She shows us the motive each of the family may have had without simply telling us, and she also lays several false trails and red herrings.  (Personally I suspected the actual culprit from the beginning because of the way he was introduced.)

I’m not crazy about murder mysteries but do enjoy the odd British country house weekend novel and this was a fine example, but with the twist of a dead body in the study with a gun!

The publisher provided a copy in exchange for a review.

Three stars.

 

The Color of Water in July – Nora Carrol

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The Color of Water in July is set in Michigan, at the fictional Pine Lake, which is obviously Lake Charlevoix. We have spent many happy days in and around the area so I wanted to enjoy the story. Unfortunately it didn’t hold together for me.

There are several main characters, Jess Carpenter who inherits a lakeside cottage from her grandmother Mamie, Mamie herself who narrates about a third of the book, and Mamie’s sister Lila.  The story revolves around events in 1922 when Lila dies swimming across the lake and Mamie ends up with an illegitimate child, Jess’s mother Margaret.

Jess comes back to Michigan to sell the cottage when Mamie dies and brings her boyfriend Russ.  I could not find anything to grab onto with Jess.  She doesn’t love Russ but she lets him talk her into selling; she doesn’t want the cottage but she remembers wonderful times there; she wanted to be a doctor to help people but ended up a research librarian.  She didn’t have much personality.

Mamie had a strong personality but the pivotal event, her claiming Margaret as her own child made no sense whatsoever.  Margaret was really Lila’s child, abandoned in the woods.  In 1922 there would have been little shame for Mamie to identify Margaret as Lila’s, as Lila was married, and even Lila abandoning the baby could have been brushed off, especially once Lila died.

Mamie’s decision cost her fiance and eventually cost Jess the love she had for Daniel and (another) illegitimate child.  Do you see the plot complexities here?

The timeline was very difficult to follow.

1922  Margaret is born
Sometime between 1940 and 1965 Jess is born
18 years later Jess meets Daniel, gets pregnant, learns Daniel is her first cousin (supposedly) and loses one baby to miscarriage and the other to abortion.
15 years after this Jess is now 33 and comes back to Michigan to sell the cottage.

As near as I can figure, Jess would have been 33 sometime in the mid 1980s, yet the book mentions Russ using the internet, which was not exactly the internet we know today.  (Remember Compushare and AOL anyone?  That’s what we had in the mid 1980s.)

The setting in one of my favorite Michigan places was the best part of the novel.  It was interesting seeing the evolution of the exclusive lake association (basically like a homeowners’ association except with servants), and the surrounding towns and trying to match real with fictional places.

Other than the fun Michigan locale, this book left me lukewarm.  I won’t look for more by the author.

I read this courtesy of Net Galley and received the Kindle version for free in exchange for an honest review.  It’s telling that I just deleted the book from my tablet.

Down Where My Love Lives, Two Books by Charles Martin, The Dead Don’t Dance and Maggie

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First, know that Down Where My Love Lives is a compilation of two novels, The Dead Don’t Dance (Awakening Series #1)
and Maggie (Awakening Series #2). Also The Dead Don’t Dance was the first book Charles Martin published. I read these within a couple weeks of reading Where the River Ends, an excellent novel with many of the same themes.  Unfortunately Down Where My Love Lives felt like the rough draft.

Many reviewers describe Martin’s writings as sentimental, but I don’t agree with that assessment.  Martin includes emotion and he writes about love as the center point and reason for being.  Unfortunately this duology has a big dose of melodrama, but it is still good enough to be an enjoyable read.

The Dead Don’t Dance Book 1

The Dead Don’t Dance starts out with Dylan and Maggie, married for just a couple of years, expecting their first child.  Maggie seems compulsive, unrealistic and controlling, and Dylan’s devotion to her was puzzling.  She sure wouldn’t be my first choice of a spouse.

Dylan farms a large plot in South Carolina that he inherited from his grandparents, but they live on only $20,000 a year. Maggie spent several hundred on nice-but-not-essential baby things at the local baby store, far more than Dylan could afford, and freaked out when she found a black hair growing on her chin.

Their son is stillborn and Maggie hemorrhages and goes into a coma.  The novel alternates flashbacks to Dylan’s life before and with Maggie with his response to her long coma.  In the meantime Dylan starts a new job teaching English at the community college (which Maggie applied for unbeknownst to Dylan), delivers Amanda’s baby in the freezing rain, tries to make friends with Maggie’s pet pig Pinky, and tends Maggie every day.  He lets his farm go and loses his crop.

Throughout we see Dylan through his thoughts and actions and how others respond to him.  He is deeply committed to his wife, overall kind and thoughtful, caring, not terribly interested in money or worldly success.  He’s the type of guy you want to know and be friends with.

The exception was the episode that seemed completely pointless, cruel and had no place in the book, the raccoon hunt.  Raccoons can be vicious and pests in a city but the hunters went into a wild swamp to hunt the coons.  The raccoon in the swamp was surely no threat or pest.  Martin describes how Amos shot the coon – deliberately NOT killing it – so that it fell down through many feet of branches to get attacked and and eaten while alive by the coon dogs.   I don’t have a problem with hunting animals you plan to eat or to remove pests like the bazillion rabbits in our area, but first why would they hunt a wild raccoon they don’t plan to eat and second, why deliberately be that cruel?  And what was the possible reason to include this in the novel?  It gave no insight to Dylan or his friends except to make me dislike the bunch.

The Dead Don’t Dance was overall mediocre and had I read it before others by Charles Martin I would not have pursued any more of his novels.  It was OK at best.

Maggie

Martin wrote a sequel that picks up 17 months later, after Maggie awakens from her coma.  Dylan experienced serious emotional events while she was in the coma and finds it very hard to tell Maggie about them, partly because he doesn’t want to make her feel even worse than she already does about their stillborn child.  This part of the novel felt authentic to me.

Maggie had an intricate and ridiculous plot, picked up the story of Dylan’s love for Maggie and threw in the complication that Maggie may be unable to carry a child to term.  Oh, and throw in the fact that Dylan’s best friend and across-the-street neighbor married Amanda whose father’s enemies – former partners in crime – are after him and everyone close to him.  That leads to kidnapping Amanda, torching Dylan’s house, killing his dog, assaulting Maggie, burning down the father’s church.

The book is overly complex. Dylan and Maggie need to get acquainted in some sense; Dylan lived 4 months alone, buried their son alone, dealt with a new job alone.  Maggie missed all that and woke up with the fear for her child top of her mind.

Maggie gets pregnant but miscarries and she and Dylan decide to adopt.  However the agency looks askew at their finances, overall life style (truck instead of a mini van) and mostly at Maggie’s emotional health.  Dylan takes steps to become acceptable to them, borrowing $40,000 to finance the adoption, trading in his truck for a van, but Maggie is oblivious to the problems.

Now add the neighbor and best friend, Amos, whose father-in-law gave evidence that put his former partners in prison for years.  Those creeps are violent and want to destroy the father-in-law, his entire family, and for some reason, Dylan too.

The last plot point is about Bryce, a former US marine who is rich but lives in a trailer in a closed drive in movie theater.  Bryce is generous with time and money and likes Dylan and Maggie, and in return they take care of him to the extent he allows it.  The twist in Maggie is that Bryce changed; he is bathed, trailer picked up and repaired, he is back in shape.  Someone from the military comes to advise Bryce’s financial adviser and Dylan to keep away from him, that Bryce could snap.

Just like the first book, Dylan is interesting, someone you want to know.  Maggie seems selfish and controlling.  Amos is a great guy, Amanda too good to be true.  Characters are partially developed, not complete people.

Summary

Charles Martin shows flashes of the good writer he later proves to be.  He writes of the most ghastly places imaginable, swamps, South Carolina farms with swarms of mosquitoes, places where a “cool” evening is 78 degrees, and makes them almost seem desirable.  He emphasizes the heat and mugginess and bugs, that summer last 6 months or more, but you can tell that he loves it.  It’s home.  All of his books are set in these horrible places.

He writes of love, especially the committed love of true marriage, but from the husband’s perspective.  Most romance books are from the wife’s point of view and it is lovely to see a man confessing his love.

He used some similar elements in Maggie as in Where the River Ends.  Both have a sick wife, a disparate couple, committed marriage, no children, icky hot muggy swampy southern setting, lots of emotion.  In fact Martin uses the term “indomitable” to describe both Maggie and Abbie in Where the River Ends.  Martin learned to tidy up his plots and show his characters far better by the time he wrote Where the River Ends.

Overall I’d give this 2 or 3 stars.  A mediocre but tolerable first novel, ragged around the edges and not a good introduction to an excellent author.

Review: Let It Burn, by Steve Hamilton, An Alex McKnight Novel

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Steve Hamilton created a special character with Alex McKnight, and it is the character’s interaction with his friends and antagonists that make the series so special.  The other point that makes Hamilton’s books special is the setting in a remote part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Synopsis

With Let It Burn: An Alex McKnight Novel we have Alex but it is set in Detroit instead of Paradise, Michigan.  The book flips between Alex’s last big case the year his life changed and today as Alex learns that the man he helped get convicted of murder, Daryl King, is getting released from prison.  That gets Alex thinking and he mentally goes back to the few points on the case that didn’t strike him as quite right.

Alex drives to Detroit to have a drink with his old sergeant and see his would-be girlfriend, and on the way stops in Houghton Lake to see the detective he worked with on the murder case.  He ends up driving around the area in Detroit where they hunted and found the young Daryl and Alex even stops to meet Daryl’s mom.  Something about her conviction that Daryl could not have killed anyone brings all Alex’s reservations to the fore and he continues to dig into the case.

Then he finds his former detective co-worker murdered and the work shifts to be a hunt for Daryl Young.  Alex still is not convinced Daryl killed the woman years before and even less convinced he killed the detective, but Daryl is the obvious suspect.

Time Flashes

At this point Let It Burn starts flipping between 30 years ago and today as Alex first learns that there are other unsolved murders with the same MO as the first lady.  The comparisons between Detroit 30 years ago and today are sad but fascinating (and I think a little outdated given some of the improvements in the last year) and we go along with Alex as he retraces his thinking and the past case.

The Ending

The very first time the eventual killer was introduced in the story he struck me as the killer, although with no real reason.  Alex eventually stumbles around, as he usually does, and resolves the whodunit and nearly ends up dead himself.  I had mixed feelings about the ending.  It was good suspense, very much in character, fit all the other books.  However, there was no earthly reason for the real murderer to attack Alex.  He could have gotten away with it.

Then the after action seemed a bit misty.  Alex was concussed and the way he narrated the action fit the concussion.

Characters

As usual Alex made the book.  Leon, his erstwhile PI partner, and Jackie, his host at the Glasgow Inn, made small cameo appearances.  Vinnie did not show up at all.  I missed the usual cast.  Daryl’s mother and the detective and Alex’s former partner were good but not as quirky or as interesting as the usual Yooper group.

Overall Let It Burn: An Alex McKnight Novel was very good, certainly better than many suspense/mystery novels.  It wasn’t quite as compelling a read as Hamilton’s other Alex McKnight books but still excellent.  The time flashes were very well done and the shift in mood from pensive to active were spot on.  It also was a little less dark than some of Hamilton’s other books.  I just missed the usual quirky characters and the Upper Peninsula setting.

Chasing Fireflies – Charles Martin – Growing Up, Family and Place

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Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery is another novel by Charles Martin set in the south with engrossing characters, frequent shifts in time and character and characters who are deeply mistreated but maintain grace throughout.  In Chasing Fireflies we have three stories:  Chase, who desperately wants to know who he is and whose he is, Sketch, an abused boy who is mute but communicates via drawing, Unc, who was framed and looted by his high-rolling brother Jack.

Chase narrates and seamlessly brings us between his memories growing up as Unc’s foster child and his current-day work investigating Sketch and his relationship with Unc and Unc’s niece Tommye who is dying of Aids.  I admired how Martin flipped between times and character focus.

Martin has a gift for making his characters come to life.  Unc is the most developed but we get a solid taste of Sketch.  Chase develops himself partly through his narration – some of which is self-pitying – and partly by his actions and observations of Unc and others.  We also see side characters like Jack, Unc’s wife Lorna, Chase’s friend Mandy.  Tommye tells her own story but it was the weakest of the bunch.  Her motives were unclear.

Chasing Fireflies has a very complex plot with lots of side journeys, some of which seemed a bit too much.  I did not understand why Unc, portrayed as a Christian man with deep grace, would have tossed a body into the river.  That seemed out of character and unnecessary.  We also heard at the beginning and near the end that evil brother Jack was after the last thing Unc owned, the Sanctuary in the middle of the 26,000 acres of swamp and timberland that Jack already extorted from Unc, but we never heard the pretext for the seizure.

The plot is melodramatic but still manages to be excellent.  I read this very fast one evening, then thought I may have missed something that would have clarified Tommye or Jack, so re-read it.  I hadn’t missed anything but the second time through I noticed a few plot and character false notes that hadn’t struck me as off kilter the the first time.

Chase’s constant refrain about wanting his Dad (no mention of Mom) and the aching hole he had as a foundling got a little tiresome.  The point of the book is family and belonging, but at some point we all have to face what is, good or bad.  Even those of us who grew up in loving families have aches in our hearts, it is part of life.

We see that Chase and Mandy are falling in love but their romance is a side conversation.  Martin could have explored that a little more, perhaps having someone to love would help heal Chase’s broken heart.

Overall I loved the book and will continue to look for books by this author.

Irene Hannon – Guardians of Justice Series, Fatal Judgment, Deadly Pursuit, Lethal Legacy

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I’m not sure how we never encountered Irene Hannon before, but after reading her novel Deceived (Private Justice, Volume 3), Dave and I got more of her books from the library.  This review covers the three books in her Guardians of Justice series, Fatal Judgment, Deadly Pursuit and Lethal Legacy.

This series covers two brothers and their sister, all involved in justice-related fields, and their close encounters with vicious or deranged nut cakes.  The books re-use the characters, with each sibling taking the spotlight in one book each.

Fatal Judgment

Jake Taylor is a US Marshal charged with protecting a US federal judge, Liz, the widow of Jake’s college best friend.  Jake has bad feelings for Liz based on her husband’s comments before he died that blamed her for being a workaholic and cold, unloving.  Liz needs security while the FBI and marshals investigate the murder of her sister which occurred at Liz’s home.  Although everyone assumes that her sister’s estranged husband did the murder, they take no chances.

The book has two plot lines, one a straightforward suspense story about finding who was trying to kill Liz and why, and the second is the more interesting, the romance between Jake and Liz.  Overall both are well done, although the suspense part was a bit implausible.

Hannon develops strong and likable characters.  She puts a face on the villain and we see him as a person, not just a foil for Jake and Liz.  I was a bit incredulous that the St. Louis police could drop everything and chase after one person like that, and I wondered what would have happened had the Liz not had the good fortune to have Jake involved.  Jake’s brother Cole is a detective on the St. Louis force and I was struck several times at how they were able to call upon the resources of that police force even when uncertain that a crime was in the works.

Deadly Pursuit

Allison, sister to Jake and Cole, is a case worker at the Children’s Family Services.  Like Liz, Allison gains the fatal attention of a disgruntled man, angry because his ex-girlfriend won’t take him back after he gets out of prison, and blames Allison for the girl friend’s stance.

Allison meets Cole’s friend, Mitch.  We have the same combination of a suspense story and romance.  This novel has the same strengths – excellent character and good story telling – as Fatal Judgment, and the same weaknesses.  I thought it a bit over the top that someone would decide to kill a social worker to pay her back for the girl friend’s rejection.  Even with the villain being a meth addict, this seemed a bit extreme and once again Mitch and Jake were able to call upon the resources of the police department in the nick of time.

Hannon makes her characters so believable that we can go along and ignore the weaknesses in the plot.  I thought this villain was particularly well done, especially the parts where he realizes that he is walking a precipice.

Lethal Legacy

Younger brother Cole, police detective, is asked to look at a case that the prior detective, Alan, already closed as a suicide.  The suicide’s daughter Kelly does not believe her father killed himself and pushed to get the case re-opened.  Cole is attracted to her immediately and agrees to look further despite being skeptical that they will find anything to show murder.

Lethal Legacy had a few interesting twists and I enjoyed it as well.  There were two villains, the murderer and the man who hired him, and neither was sympathetic.  Had the murderer not tried to eliminate Kelly’s questions by killing her, he would have gotten away with it.  There was not much evidence to overturn the suicide determination.

Maybe it was because this was the third in the series and I read all three within a few days, but I didn’t care for Lethal Legacy as much.  The romance seemed a bit more contrived and the villains more hurriedly sketched than the others.

Overall

All three novels shared similar strengths and weaknesses.  The would-be victim in all three was female (and it would be interesting to see Hannon turn it around and have the girl save the guy sometime) and all were in the right place and time to attract a man who was looking for the next step in life, ready to find a wife, come back to church, start a family.

The romance was well done, understated and not at all steamy, and we could see the characters falling in love as if it was inevitable.   The suspense part was also done well, assuming we bought into the basic premise.

I am glad I picked the first book, Deceived, up off the end cap at the library!