This novel was given to me thanks to Kelsey from Book Publicity Services (who had contacted me earlier in 2017 to read Pigeon Blood Red by Ed Duncan, who’s review can be found here.) I hosted a giveaway on my Instagram for another copy of the book, which was given away to Dana.
Authors: Anne Rothman-Hicks and Ken Hicks
Pages: 209
Stars: 2/5
Jane Larson is helping out a friend at her law firm by working on a child support case. Soon, Jane finds that there is more behind the simple child support case than she thought. Drugs, murder, and deadly threats all come out of this one case and it’s more than what Jane signed up for.
This novel was written by a duo, Anne Rothman-Hicks and her husband, Ken Hicks. The story is centered around Jane who lives in New York. One upside to the writing was that because both authors live in New York, they were able to give some good descriptions of places that Jane would have traveled to.
One thing that is certain throughout this writing is that there was the influence of a man writing it. There were times where Jane would have internal thoughts that didn’t sound like something a woman would actually say. Rather, it sounded like an older man who thought he knew how a woman would think and then wrote those thoughts down. This really affected the writing style and voice, and not in a positive way.
Jane herself was hard to connect to, she had no real set personality. It felt like one second she had a huge temper and then in the next paragraph she was some sort of simpering character. When she is being attacked in an office, rather than fight a man, something that I find I would probably do in a scenario, she throws her phone at him as he is fleeing, rather than going after him after he took evidence away from the office. It felt like something a powerful layer wouldn’t do, it felt too much of a “girly” move. As if, she attempted to help but didn’t actually want to help.
One thing I found interesting was the two characters who I cared about the most, Vinnie and Dolly, never really show up in the novel after the first introductions. They had real personalities and felt like they were based off of real people. The two of them had more personality built into them compared to the other characters in the novel. I really think it was a mistake, not having them come back for more than a phone call.
I really couldn’t get into the story that much and found myself taking a break from it way too often. The pacing is slow and dialogue heavy. The only time that it really caught my attention was when Jane was shot at and that was just because it felt like the only real action in the novel, besides the fire. The writing is riddled with antiquated sayings and odd comments about characters which really affected my read of it.
A small pet peeve of mine is that whenever the characters were asking a question, it was never followed by a question mark. Rather, there was a comma, which didn’t make any sense.
Overall in my opinion, the writing was poor because of the odd comments and antiquated sayings, the voice and style of the authors really didn’t resonate with me, and the characterization needed a lot of help. This novel is a series of books about Jane Larson, however, I will not be picking up the next novel.
The Written Adventure 