The Book of Cold Cases

It's kind of impressive how a book that is decidedly adult in tone and prose still manages to feel like a story on training wheels. Like this didn't read as YA and no punches were pulled content-wise, but I couldn't help but feel like I was playing with bumper lanes set up.

This was a book club read, and it was actually my suggestion that won the last round of voting, so maybe that's why I'm as disappointed as I am that I didn't love this book. There is a central mystery and the narrative jumps between two protagonists: Shea, who is a modern-day true crime girlie, and Beth, a hardened old woman who gives us flashbacks to forty years earlier when she was arrested, tried, then acquitted for the murder of two men. The initial draw of, "what really happened back in the seventies?" is there. So far so good.

But pretty early on there's an explicit display of supernatural phenomenon that piqued my interest and had me thinking we were veering into haunted house territory. But then that aspect was left underutilized until the very end of the story. I was also expecting a more prominent theme about stagnation and lingering on the past, but it wasn't explored as fully as I thought it was set up to be.

This book didn't know what genre it wanted to be, a crucial character is introduced surprisingly late into the story, and the central mystery was solved unusually early on considering how much longer the plot ran after the big reveal. Probably the most damning comment that sums up how I feel about this was when one of my book club buddies said, "this was an airport book." More of a literary product than a piece of fiction in my opinion. Still, there's a time and a place for that, and I've definitely seen it done much worse than this, so that's something.

This was my third book by Simone St. James. I totally adored the first one I read, The Sundown Motel, really enjoyed The Broken Girls and am a bit so-so on this one now. All books are pretty much the same. American small town, an inquisitive young woman looking into something from the past, and two interwoven timelines solving the mystery, always involving some form of supernatural haunting. In this case, the inquisitive woman is true crime blogger Shea who operates a website called The Book of Cold Cases. One day she runs into Elizabeth Greer, a woman who was accused of murder in the late 70s. Shea asks to interview her, and then gets swept up into Beth's story and the haunting of the mansion that Beth still lives in.

Maybe it would have worked better for me if Beth had been a likeable character, or Shea. Outstanding character of the book was clearly Winston Purrchill, Shea's cat.

In any case, overall this book felt super-predictable, and so I merely thought it was a decent read, instead of an excellent one.