Nothing but trouble by Roberta Kray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I won this book in a Twitter contest held by the UK’s The Crime Vault for for “What would you name your series character?” I came up with Inspector Everlast Forlorn. And I won ten books! I read the descriptions of all the books and chose to read Roberta Kray’s first.
@thecrimevault Inspector Everlast Forlorn. Lots of ways to play w that kind of character: deceptively pessimistic, nvr quit. #CrimeVaultcomp
— ShireenJ (@ShireenJ) January 17, 2013
I’m not familiar with Kray. I didn’t know if this book was the start of a series or mid-series or what. But it didn’t matter. She weaves in memories of previous cases so effortlessly that a new reader would learn some of the backstory while old hands would not be bored and start flipping pages to get to the new stuff again. By the end of the book, I still couldn’t say definitively that this book is part of a series, but I did feel like I was in the middle of a story about the main characters. It would be interesting to see what happens next.
I liked the characters. It took me awhile to get to know them, and I felt like sometimes they bordered on the stereotypical. All in all though, I was left not quite knowing enough about the crime solvers and thus wanting to know more.
The plot was convoluted. And this is where my brain-injury-imposed reading limitations put a serious dent in my ability to solve the mystery. I didn’t. And even when it was solved in the book, it took me awhile to piece the picture together in my poor head because it’s not a simple crime. I never fully understood the final motive (I wonder if I missed the explanation that some authors include, or if there wasn’t one), and I think that’s because the reader needs to sink right into this book and be able to follow the characters and build up the big picture and put the pieces together like one does a jigsaw puzzle. And I couldn’t do that. It’s a book for rereading and for engaging the mind, for sure.
