A trucker is abducting prostitutes from truck stops across the country. A couple of sisters nearly get run off the road by his lorry and show him the finger; he follows them and then, when their car breaks down...

This was a 99p Kindle deal of the day, and had a fair number of good reviews so I thought I'd give it a go.

It was not really that great - I wasn't sure exactly what kind of book it was meant to be: it wasn't very thrilling, it wasn't very gruesome, it wasn't very tense. From the reviews I gathered that this was one in a series of books about Cody Hoyt, who's some kind of law enforcement officer with a drinking problem. Much of the first part of the book contains references to a crime that (presumably) was the subject of a previous novel. Cody has a partner, Cassandra, who respects him even though she's not happy with his unorthodox investigation techniques. So I assumed it was a sort of romance/crime type thing.

[Spoiler] The most memorable thing about the book though, was that Cody gets killed about half-way through. I assumed, when he got shot, that he was just wounded, and would come round with Cassie standing over him. But no, he's dead. So at that point, having assumed that Cody+Cassie's main problem would be deciding whether to go to bed together after they'd solved the crime, I was a bit excited about what might happen next.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book was fairly unexciting. And it was almost as if the author didn't want it to be exciting: the sisters, locked in their prison while awaiting their abductors to turn up, were just left there, and Cassie is left a letter by someone telling her where she needs to go to find the sisters, so it's not like she has to do much investigating. And when she gets there, she just shoots the baddie as soon as she sees him: there's little excitement or tension (maybe that's a good thing because it would have been a bit cliched to have Cassie be captured and having to work out her escape).

I think there were some typos in the book - one that jarred and had me a bit confused for a while was "she wretched on the floor".

Maybe the "series" continues with Cassie solving more crimes. But I won't bother to read any more. It was OK but I wouldn't recommend it.

Completed : 03-Apr-2015