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A review by usbsticky
The Dark Inside by Solomon Carter
3.0
Spoilers ahead.
A beautiful woman is found naked and dead in a posh English seaside AirB&B. She has no ID and everything has been wiped clean in the flat. DI Hogarth and his team of two (DS Palmer and DC Kaplan) are assigned to the case.
Starting from scratch they do a good job of first identifying the woman (from tattoos) to finding her history, her contacts and who might have had a reason to kill her. Classic police/detective protocol and done well. However, I found the writing a bit slow and not gripping. The litmus test of this is when I decide to check the news on my phone or do other stuff in the middle of a chapter. If it's enthralling enough I will usually forget everything else and keep reading.
Once the culprit became obvious the writing slowed down even more. I'm sure readers were mentally shouting out wondering why the investigators didn't zero in on this immediately, surely it was obvious to the detectives too. Instead, the author tried to drag it out and as a result the ending was not as satisfying as it could be.
There is also a side plot of the Hogarth's live in girlfriend being involved in something weird. We are told snatches of this throughout the book. And in fact, the book ends on a cliffhanger of this side plot. I got this book free on the Kindle and this whole side plot and cliffhanger seems to be a way for the author, publisher or Amazon to get you to buy the next book in the series.
To be honest, the price for the series isn't bad. I checked out this author's offerings and his omnibus sets come out to be about $1 per book (range from 33 cents to $2-3/book depending on series), which is a very good deal indeed. However, I disliked the way that the ending seemed to be a ploy to get the reader to buy the next book, and it was a side plot anyway, that could be completely ignored in the book. I thought a lot about the rating to give this book. I didn't want my dissatisfaction of this to be a factor in the rating as the rating should only be on the content. In the end, I decided 3 stars to be fair. The writing was easy to read and follow, however it was slow going and the ending was even slower. A 4-5 star meant I would get the next in the series immediately and this wasn't one of them.
A beautiful woman is found naked and dead in a posh English seaside AirB&B. She has no ID and everything has been wiped clean in the flat. DI Hogarth and his team of two (DS Palmer and DC Kaplan) are assigned to the case.
Starting from scratch they do a good job of first identifying the woman (from tattoos) to finding her history, her contacts and who might have had a reason to kill her. Classic police/detective protocol and done well. However, I found the writing a bit slow and not gripping. The litmus test of this is when I decide to check the news on my phone or do other stuff in the middle of a chapter. If it's enthralling enough I will usually forget everything else and keep reading.
Once the culprit became obvious the writing slowed down even more. I'm sure readers were mentally shouting out wondering why the investigators didn't zero in on this immediately, surely it was obvious to the detectives too. Instead, the author tried to drag it out and as a result the ending was not as satisfying as it could be.
There is also a side plot of the Hogarth's live in girlfriend being involved in something weird. We are told snatches of this throughout the book. And in fact, the book ends on a cliffhanger of this side plot. I got this book free on the Kindle and this whole side plot and cliffhanger seems to be a way for the author, publisher or Amazon to get you to buy the next book in the series.
To be honest, the price for the series isn't bad. I checked out this author's offerings and his omnibus sets come out to be about $1 per book (range from 33 cents to $2-3/book depending on series), which is a very good deal indeed. However, I disliked the way that the ending seemed to be a ploy to get the reader to buy the next book, and it was a side plot anyway, that could be completely ignored in the book. I thought a lot about the rating to give this book. I didn't want my dissatisfaction of this to be a factor in the rating as the rating should only be on the content. In the end, I decided 3 stars to be fair. The writing was easy to read and follow, however it was slow going and the ending was even slower. A 4-5 star meant I would get the next in the series immediately and this wasn't one of them.