Joseph Young's Reviews > Salvation in Death

Midway through the book, the main character thinks about some lawyer, "Does this guy really want to be a cliche?" and I thought, "Why not? Everyone else in this book is."

I don't know if the audio version makes it worse, but almost all the characters in the book were cliches. The main character, while slightly more fleshed out, is unlikable to me, as she seems to be a power-tripping asshole who somehow justifies it by having been a victim at one point in her life. She is never wrong as a detective; there are no red herrings. Somehow, Eve Dallas is the super cop, with 100% hunch reliability.

I'm not sure if there was a problem with the pacing, or just the overall plot. The second murder seems somewhat thrown in as a sidetrack, like a mini-story within a story that doesn't add much to the original. Perhaps there is an over-emphasis on women getting over rape/molestation scenarios that doesn't resonate with me. Oddly, for the first half of the book, the only thing that might redeem it a bit might be the sex scenes, and even those are cliched and forced.

The last third of the book relied too much on throwbacks, which makes it confusing if you haven't read the books being referred to. The ending is predictable: good guy wins, bad guy goes to jail, everything is revealed.

There's just an overwhelming one-dimensionality to everything that made it hard to read this book. If not for goodreads, (eg the claim of having finished a book) I probably would not have gotten past the first 2 chapters.