Friday, September 12, 2014

Review: Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan #1) by Leslie A. Kelly


CAN A MURDER VICTIM'S OWN MEMORIES BE USED TO SOLVE A CRIME?

Detective Veronica Sloan isn't shocked by much. Having lived through the worst terrorist attacks in history — which destroyed much of Washington, D.C. — she's immune to even the most vicious brutality. But even she is stunned by the discovery of a murder in the basement of the under-reconstruction White House.

Sloan and FBI Agent Jeremy Sykes have been assigned to investigate the homicide because the victim was a participant in a top-secret experiment. Veronica has been training for just this kind of case, waiting to use her special skills, anxious to learn if a recording device implanted in a victim's head can help solve their murder … before the killer strikes again.






I love a good crime drama. Maybe it's because my dad was a crime scene investigator while I was growing up and I've come to love the whole process of catching a killer. I don't know. But when I saw that this was a crime drama with a (semi) futuristic twist to it, I jumped at the chance to read this novel. And then I let it sit on my TBR shelf for months. Months and months. For some reason, I just wasn't inclined to pick it up. I think subconsciously, I was wary. But I had no reason to be ... this is the first novel I've read from this author and I don't read reviews on a novel that I'm going to read because I don't want to taint my first impressions and feelings. I really had no reason to not pick this book up. I just didn't.

When I finally did pick it up, I wasn't disappointed. It really grabs you from the first page and immerses you into this world in the not too distant future and it is eerily close to home. With how things are in the world today, this book could be considered a bit foreshadowing if things play out as everyone fears. Anyhow, it was really cool ... the technology and the reasoning behind it ... it seemed feasible. Everything in this novel seemed like it could come to pass ... it was really kind of creepy. 

Anyhow, about a fourth of the way through the novel, I just kept hitting these patches of reader quicksand. You know what I'm talking about ... the story feels like it ran into a brick wall and is struggling to plow its way through ... it was just rough. I felt like I had to force myself to read further and further. Reading shouldn't be like that. But it kept this sluggishness up for pretty much the rest of the book. The beginning of the novel felt like it was just going to blow my mind and then this. I was pretty disappointed when I put this one down. Maybe I've hit a reading plateau and if I were to pick this up at another time, I would enjoy it. I don't know. What I do know is that while this book isn't badly written, it just wasn't for me.







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