WHAT I LEARNED READING Dead for Good by Stacy Claflin with Nolon King:
I left a five star review as the book was well worth the read. It was well written, the prose was good and easy to read. This book held my interest and the action started on Page 1.
I would classify this book as a psychological thriller. What I found most clever about the book is that all of the suspense was inside the family home, with a little help from some outside neighbors. The plotline was very believable and it worked throughout the story.
The author/authors created characters who had a lot to do during the story but also had a lot of depth to them as well.
The only criticism I have is that the ending was not so much a twist as more of a 'out of nowhere' kind of resolution. There was no real foreshadowing of the dual side to the culprit. I will keep it very vague in case anyone reading this would want to read the book, which I would highly recommend.
I'm no expert on plot twists, but most of the YouTube Teachers suggest that a surprise ending needs to be foreshadowed somewhere in the story, so the reader says, ah, yes, I should have seen that. That is the one thing I didn't really feel in this read. I felt the true culprit kind of just popped up in the end to surprise the reader but wasn't foreshadowed in any way.
That was my only criticism. I still gave this book a 5 star on Amazon because I believe my criticism only came from me being an author and looking for these things. My guess from the reviews on this book is that normal readers didn't even catch the lack of foreshadowing I'm referring to here. The character was written into the beginning of the story, and that was enough for the normal readers.
This was also a great psychological thriller without having a psychiatrist or psychologist in the plot. The whole thing worked well within the one family.
MY FAVORITE TURN OF PHRASES:
~ We're in this together. Always and forever.
~ People tended to only focus on the good in the deceased as if death automatically diluted the truth.
SUMMARY:
I highly recommend Dead for Good. It gets high marks for great plot, great characters and readability. This book's action started literally on Page 1 and kept up until the very end. It didn't sag once.
