Quick-take: Needs more editing, still enjoyable.

Dan's Review

Alexandra Quinlan is the survivor of a notorious murder attempt on her entire family and became a major national story. She was the lone survivor. However, due to a botched police investigation that initially accused her, and never fully retracted their statement, she is by many still blamed for the unsolved crime. For many, in their minds, she got away with multiple homicide.

The book follows her journey of constantly hiding from her fame, finding her own career, and her own personal project of trying to track down the real killer years later.

That is the most I am willing to reveal. As with mystery and crime novels, each nugget is a carefully timed reveal that adds enjoyment to the story. I have an "ah-ha" moment with Alex and she finds clues, and I cringe and scream when new crimes appear. The book is not long, but it packs a punch. There are high ranking officials behaving badly. There are careers at stake. There is reckless investigating. There is a lot to enjoy.

A critical piece of a good crime novel is plausibility. That is the part I take issue with. Alex tries very hard to disappear and does so in a savvy "hiding in plain sight" approach. However, if the "true crime nuts" that obsess over her the way she claims, I just don't believe it. It is just too easy to connect the dots to find her. It would be more believable if she dealt with the fanatics as they come with her preparations as simply a way to "not make it easy for them".

Another complaint: too much repetition. There are many instances where 2 investigators come together and exchange notes. The book has me reading a conversation explaining something that I was literally just present to a few pages ago. And then it may do it again.

I actually like a bit of over-explaining, especially in reference to something that happened a few chapters ago. However, the book can have the reverse problem. A few times it drops the name of a character, and I am frantically searching my mind of who this person is. This gets really difficult because there is a recurring character that exists entirely as a pronoun.

Score: 5/5. The book moves fast and is entertaining. Problems aside, that is all I really asked of it.