Okay, this book was so cluttered and overcomplicated that it was VERY hard to follow.
First off, I will say that the narrator of the audiobook annoyed me by mispronouncing simple words and phrases such as "winding" or "short-lived."
The next thing that got on my nerves: the main character (Eve) believes that she was shot by her boyfriend. She found her friend dead in his cabin and in a flash saw her boyfriend firing a gun. The bullet ricocheted, striking her in the temple and nearly killing her. She tells the police, they arrest Cole, she is prepared to testify against him, but her testimony was unreliable, so after 3 months, he is set free. The first thing he does is try to get to her and she wants to confront him as well. Though she has a restraining order against him, he shows up on her doorstep in the middle of the night. She does confront him with a gun (unloaded) and after some heated discussion, allows him in the house! He has just come from the scene of her father's murder and has blood on him, but the next thing you know, they are falling back into a relationship. Suddenly she isn't sure what she saw that night. I'm sorry, if there was an inkling that the man had shot me, I would have nothing to do with him and would call the cops if he came anywhere near me! What kind of idiot falls back in love with someone that she thinks COULD be a murderer? Eventually you find out that her memory was correct. He was there, he was just shooting at the actual killer and hit her by mistake, but he never tells anyone this until she remembers. He called 911 and stayed with her until he hears the sirens coming, then runs away to save his own rear end because he thinks the cops have it in for him. What kind of a relationship can they ever have after he accidentally shot her, then left her to save his own rear end and after she accuses him of being a murderer, for which he is locked up for 3 months, loses his career, his credibility, his home, his car, his money to pay for his defense?
Another thing that annoyed me was that the day after Eve's father's murder, there are moments when she and Cole are flirting and when she is joking with her cat, etc. She said that she had been distant with her father lately, but I don't care how distant you are, you will probably be a lot more upset than that if you found out your dad was brutally murdered. And Cole, who found him, ought to be more shaken up, instead of flirting. Eve grieves at the beginning, but seems to bounce back very quickly.
Okay, the thing that really made me hate this book was that it was confusing and overcomplicated. There were too many twists and too much information. I see now that this is in the middle of a series of books, revolving around the homicide detectives Bentz and Montoya, so I decided that all of this violence that nearly every character has suffered in their past (that originally seemed like too much coincidence) goes back to the fact that this is about HOMICIDE detectives. There WILL be violence. It seems a strange link for the characters though.
Originally, I thought Cole WAS the killer and was having trouble separating scenes and points of view. It just seemed like the readers are constantly being bombarded with new information and new scenarios and it was hard to digest. I ended up making a chart to try to understand how in the world it could be possible that all these people are related. I tried to describe it to a friend and she said I lost her and that was exactly how I felt as I was trying to figure it all out and keep it straight in my mind. It was again too much coincidence and really far-fetched. I put the chart above so you can see how confusing it all got. I tried to show parentages and relationships and how it all seemed to intersect.
The thing that finally got me was that all along the killer that we have been following, not knowing who he is, is not the actual mastermind. The mastermind is the twin brother of the main character. Coincidental that he found a lunatic that had been at the mental hospital at the same time as everyone else in his sick game, who was obsessed with his twin sister Eve, and was able to control him. He somehow made it onto the police force where he was able to tamper with evidence, keep track of where this guy was and when he was released so he could set his plan in motion, and put speakers in the guys bed and spoke to him as if he were the voice of God, instructing him who to kill and how. It was just all too much.
Here's another thing that sickened me. There was way too much sexual stuff, incest, etc., going on in this book. While the twin brother is blaming his adopted mother for molesting him and ruining him and how wrong that was, he turns around and talks about wanting to rape his sisters. How do you arrive at the conclusion that it was wrong for someone to do that to you, but it's okay if you do it to someone else? Same way with the crazy guy he was controlling. He says Eve is a whore and yet he wants to rape her. He condemns her for her sexual sin (mostly imagined), but he wants her for himself and that's okay, I guess....? Sick, sick double standards.
The final thing that made me hate this book was that the author was vulgar. I mean, it's obvious from what I have said heretofore that the book was pretty sick anyways. But, the thing that I found was that the the author used vulgarities, not in dialogue of the chracters (you might expect vulgar slang from the characters), but in her descriptions as a narrator. That, to me, shows a lack of vocabulary. If the only thing you can use to describe body parts is a crass vulgarity, that tells me you aren't a very good writer. Maybe some people like that, but my taste is a little higher.
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