Rating: 3/5
Review:
A decent read but nothing special
I haven't read a Kathy Reichs book for many years but I
thought I'd give a new protagonist a try.
I thought this was an OK read but nothing special.
The bulk of the narrative is by Sunday Night (oh, please!),
an ex-military, ex-cop who has all sorts of demons in her past and is living as
a virtual recluse on a tiny island in South Carolina. She is recruited to find and either kill or
bring to justice a group of four people who planted a bomb which killed members
of the family of a very wealthy old lady.
The beginning is very good.
Sunday's (oh, please!) narrative voice is snappy and convincing, the
set-up is well done and Reichs creates some believable characters. This carried on for a good deal of the book,
but the smart comebacks did get a bit much, the emergence of Sunday's (oh,
please!) Traumatic Past and her bond to a victim she'd never met didn't really
convince me and the plot, while no more absurd than many books in this genre,
was pretty implausible. Add to this a
lot of very lengthy details about geography and exactly what food was eaten by
absolutely everyone at every meal and so on, plus some long and pretty vacuous
psychologising (not to mention some absurdly unlikely reasons for not informing
the police about an impending major atrocity) and things did begin to pall for
me.
There are also some plot holes; for example, the baddie seems
to know an impossibly large amount about Sunday's (oh, please!) activities, but
we're never told how he does it other than "I have my sources" and
that he's "good with gadgets," apparently. There are other problems,
and they do get in the way a bit.
I did finish Two Nights, it's certainly no worse than a lot
of thrillers and might make a diverting afternoon's beach read, but only a
lukewarm recommendation from me, I'm afraid.
(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)
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