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A review by ncrabb
Night Sins by Tami Hoag
2.0
This is the fictional account of a small Minnesota town and the abduction of a young boy—the son of a highly respected physician and her accountant husband.
Hoag skillfully presents a two-week torturous ordeal for the family, the community, and the law enforcement people. In fact, Agent Megan O’Malley is experiencing a baptism of fire, since her first day on the job as a field agent is also the day the boy was taken. This will hold your interest as the winding path of the plotline takes you inside the mind of a killer and into the heart of a Catholic zealot. You’ll watch as cracks become chasms in a community full of secrets.
Here’s the thing: I figured out who would ultimately get arrested for this way, way, way early in the book. When it finally happened after hours and hours of slogging through it, I actually found myself yawning and saying something like, “yeah, ok, what’s next?”
I wasn’t a big fan of the police chief, and the state field agent, O’Malley, absolutely turned me off beyond belief. Her ultra-extreme uber-feminism shtick was pretty threadbare by page three and went from there to frustratingly tiresome and silly. It almost felt like a caricature in a few places. Granted, Hoag seems to want to sharply contrast O'malley's super-independence with a vulnerable side discovered by the police chief, and Hoag gives you believable reasons for all that sharp-edged Stiletto repeatedly slammed into some guy's crotch kind of behavior, but something about its ongoing shrillness somehow exhausted me.
I don’t mean to be so uncharitable. I’ve read other things by this author that captivated me and impressed me. I’ll definitely read the sequel to this book, a title called Guilty As Sin, because so many things went unfinished in this one. What I hope to communicate here is that I’m not criticizing Hoag’s writing style or belittling her obvious talent. There are scores of compelling reasons her books sell so well and win awards, and it’s not my intent to slap down any of those reasons or minimize them. Nor should you consider this review some kind of steely-eyed pronouncement of never again, as in never again will I read Hoag’s books. I’ll indeed read them, and I’m sure I’ll thoroughly enjoy them. But for whatever reason, this one left me cold and feeling rather anticlimactic.
Hoag skillfully presents a two-week torturous ordeal for the family, the community, and the law enforcement people. In fact, Agent Megan O’Malley is experiencing a baptism of fire, since her first day on the job as a field agent is also the day the boy was taken. This will hold your interest as the winding path of the plotline takes you inside the mind of a killer and into the heart of a Catholic zealot. You’ll watch as cracks become chasms in a community full of secrets.
Here’s the thing: I figured out who would ultimately get arrested for this way, way, way early in the book. When it finally happened after hours and hours of slogging through it, I actually found myself yawning and saying something like, “yeah, ok, what’s next?”
I wasn’t a big fan of the police chief, and the state field agent, O’Malley, absolutely turned me off beyond belief. Her ultra-extreme uber-feminism shtick was pretty threadbare by page three and went from there to frustratingly tiresome and silly. It almost felt like a caricature in a few places. Granted, Hoag seems to want to sharply contrast O'malley's super-independence with a vulnerable side discovered by the police chief, and Hoag gives you believable reasons for all that sharp-edged Stiletto repeatedly slammed into some guy's crotch kind of behavior, but something about its ongoing shrillness somehow exhausted me.
I don’t mean to be so uncharitable. I’ve read other things by this author that captivated me and impressed me. I’ll definitely read the sequel to this book, a title called Guilty As Sin, because so many things went unfinished in this one. What I hope to communicate here is that I’m not criticizing Hoag’s writing style or belittling her obvious talent. There are scores of compelling reasons her books sell so well and win awards, and it’s not my intent to slap down any of those reasons or minimize them. Nor should you consider this review some kind of steely-eyed pronouncement of never again, as in never again will I read Hoag’s books. I’ll indeed read them, and I’m sure I’ll thoroughly enjoy them. But for whatever reason, this one left me cold and feeling rather anticlimactic.