The Face Of Deception (Eve Duncan, #1)

Eve Duncan is not my favorite main character. She is so oblivious to the relationships around her, which I think is intentional, but it's not my favorite strategy for inserting twists into a story. She's set up as this character with a tragic background, who has focused on her work intentionally to forget her grief. Joe tiptoes around her and kind of puppeteers her recovery behind the scenes (and he is also in love with Eve, which I called in Chapter 15 but was disappointed to find that Eve couldn't just have one male friend). Logan sees her soft side behind her walls and falls in love with her because of it (called it in Chapter 1 that John Logan was going to fall in love with Eve).

I think I had a hard time feeling anything for Eve (or really, any of the characters) because even though she's the main character, we as the readers are removed from her thoughts and decision-making. The story is written in 3rd person, and it doesn't really feel like we are any closer to Eve's thought processes than we are with the other characters in the story whose POVs we are given (Logan, Joe, Lisa, Fiske, etc). Everything is external: all decisions and plans are made in dialogue. Even Eve's personality is expressed entirely through dialogue. She basically just argues with everybody the whole time :shrug:

Fiske is a pretty scary character, but I didn't feel it viscerally. I didn't feel personally threatened by him. I've read much scarier, unnerving villains in the past, ones that made me personally afraid for my safety just by reading the book. I feel like Fiske should have added a layer of dread to the reading of this book, and he just didn't.

The twist at the end (where Lisa reveals that Ben knew he was going to die and planned the whole thing) didn't feel as impactful as it should have. I had a hard time believing Lisa-as-a-cold-murderer was actually Lisa-the-mournful-widow who is just executing a plan that her husband engineered.

The initial story where Eve believes Logan is looking for Kennedy's skull was SO cliché, I'm glad it changed into something else. But I feel like the author was going for this epic story, and it sort of just got lost in the logistics. It's just a lot of driving around between places and waiting for things to happen.

Also was really disappointed to find that there were no on-stage romance scenes with Eve and Logan at any point in the book. We just get some vague impressions of things happening behind-the-scenes in the epilogue.

Speaking of the epilogue: the interludes where Eve dreams about Bonnie were sort of odd. I'm not sure how I feel about them. Bonnie insists that she's not a dream, and Eve insists that Bonnie is just her imagination. They sort of serve as foreshadowing within the story, where Bonnie warns Eve about something, in case the reader didn't already pick up on the previous clues dropped in the story.

I truly enjoyed the sections of the story where Eve is actually doing her work. I most enjoyed the sections where she explains how certain processes work. She explains the process of reconstructing the skull, doing the superimposition of the reconstructed skull and pictures of the victim, and the use of chemiluminescence for DNA printing. Those details were fascinating and I'm really glad the author chose to include them.