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Writer’s Diary – Book Review – Dead for Good

dead-for-good-coverWHAT 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.

Writer’s Diary – Book Review – A Perfect Alibi

This is not so much a book review of the story written by Anne Baines, but more about what I, as an author, learned from reading it.  To me, that fits more into a Writer’s Diary.  The name of the book is A Perfect Alibi, and it is Book 1 of the Sam Arbichaut Mysteries.

First of all, I enjoyed the book immensely.  Since I began to write mysteries, I no longer just read mysteries for entertainment.  My author’s mind is always looking for what I can learn and use in my own writing.

I found this book to be easy to read, which I think is crucial in today’s world where people are too busy to spend two pages reading a description of the trees in the field.  So the action in the book moves at a pace that keeps the reader engaged and trying to think of how the mystery will unfold.

PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR WRITING TIPS:

I also learned a few things in the book about PI techniques.  For example, PIs keep the cars running so the sound of an engine catching won’t make anyone look up or draw any attention to themselves.  Pulling out after someone would make them suspicious, but a car that was already in motion wouldn’t strike anyone as a potential tail.

In spite of all the scenes in movies and on TV, the identifying of a body is done today with photos.

MY FAVORITE TURN OF PHRASES:

  • plasticky smiles
  • Death was brutal and messy.  A small, contained scene like this was outside the natural order of things.
  • the sort of sleazy people who thought the worst of others because they were so lowbrow themselves
  • He knew the sorts of things they said behind their hands
  • Now he was in his late forties, he was terrified of the half-century marker he saw approaching, and he wanted to grasp at the youth that had slipped away.
  • Clint didn’t have the look in his eye of someone savoring gossip.
  • Fredricks was quiet now, almost introspective.
  • It sounded like she was the sort of person who was never satisfied because she’s never bothered to figure out what she really wanted in life.  It was like she was following all the rules because she thought the world owed her happiness if she did.

There were so many more great phrases used by Anne Baines.  I would recommend this book to any author focused on improving their own prose as well as any authors who want to learn about private investigator techniques.  The prose was fantastic and I have the other books in this series on my “next up” list.