A review by reddogjones
The Chill by Scott Carson

adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I liked all the elements of this book - rain, dams, upstate New York setting, water tunnel workers, coast guard rescuers, ghosts.....it had great building blocks to the story. I loved the slow building dread, the hopping from character to character as we steadily came to see what the problem and mystery were, the strangeness of ghosts and hallucination. BUT..... something was missing, something in the writing that made it feel as if the story was not going quite as deep as it could go.  Also, I had a really hard time picturing the dam and tunnel systems and how it was connected, and what even was happening when disaster finally did hit and that led to a lot of confusion at the end which diminished my interest.

Oh how I would have LOVED to see a dam and tunnel diagram, that would have been soooooo cool and would have added a lot to the story.   Sometimes I think about what books would look like if they were written by Stephen King - this book would have been a lot longer and would have had so many more deep dives into history and character; it would have poured so much more detail into the history and mechanics of dams we probably would have seen and felt it all so much more powerfully. 

So, I liked this book but it felt a little surface to me.