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As a freelancer, I review books, primarily mysteries/thrillers & YA, for the Oregonian. Last night I sat down with a potential candidate, but in five pages I had abandoned the book. Why?

"Although there were deep shadows beneath her eyes, with her auburn ponytail and cashmere sweater and tweed slacks, she knew she didn’t look like a standard nutcase..."
The POV is a tiny bit off here, it seems to me. That auburn strikes a false note. I hear the author's voice. I don't normally think about my hair color, and auburn has nothing to do with not being a nut case.

"with an urgency that never ceased to amaze him."
Cliche.

" He didn’t know for a fact..."
Another cliche.

"built like truck..."
Again a cliche.

"It was a damned shame that the child had never turned up"
Another.

"�Funny how no one wants to pay their taxes,” he said. “But just let the county miss one garbage pickup and they’re lined up from here to Sunday.”"
Kate thought to say that death and taxes are the only sure things in life, just as she’d often heard her grandmother say. But then she remembered why she was there."
"Here to Sunday?" Cliche. And that death and taxes thing seems to be phrased so oddly - the phrase is universal enough not to be linked to just one person - just so the author can work in mention of the grandmother.

The sherriff asks Kate how long she has lived in town:
“A little more than two years,” she said. “I have a house south of town near the old candy factory. It’s an antique mall now, but everyone still calls it the candy factory.”
Um, she knows he has lived there longer than her, so why is she telling him this? This is dangerously close to "As you know, Bob" dialog - it's expository.

"We get a lot of tourists in for the antiques,” Kate said.
They both live in the town, he's lived there longer than her, so this is just starting to feel like the author wants us to know these things.

" Truth be told, she looked a little crazy. Even in cold weather she wore colorful, loose linen dresses of the sort favored by the women of the area’s hippie community and woven sandals."
Two things bothered me about this. "Truth be told" is again a cliche. and the second sentence would have read a lot better if "woven sandals" had been stuck in right after "she wore" with the colorful dresses part of the sentence coming last.

Little things add up for me. I'm not going to keep reading. Before I made the decision, I looked to see what the pre-pub reviews were like. The only one I could find was from PW. "In this plodding debut," it said, and since PW is generally not that mean, that was it for me.





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