Friday, September 7, 2012

Review - Counting on You

Title: Counting on You
Author: Lisa Bork
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Format: ebook; approximately 272 pages
Genre: Soft Mystery
Source: Amazon

To be honest, when I first started this book, I was not optimistic. The writing did not grab me, but I decided to plod on. As the story continued, I became more interested, but still there was something missing. This book falls into the soft-boiled mystery genre. There is no thrilling chase or high suspense. A book that you can easily pick up and put down when needed. A beach read if you will. Traveling to the Marshall Islands to see a canister of cremains of the man that she believes is her birthfather shot into space, Julia Locke, a professional storyteller, must also use this time to seek out the man that she is certain is her half-brother.

Julia is not really looking for her long lost family per say, she is in desperate need of a kidney transplant and Matt is her last hope. With a rare blood type and no other family member’s that will match, this is a make it or break it time for Julia.

What she did not anticipate was finding the body of a man in the hotel room next door and being lead on a wild chase to save her brother and his mother from being tried for his murder. Throw in the island police, the military police, a Hollywood actor with a brain tumor, a starlet that is dead but everyone is still seeing on the island, an innocent village boy that is just trying to collect laundry for his sister to wash so they can save enough money to travel to Arizona to be with their mother and you have a tragic situation on your hands.

There is one section near the end that I had to reread to get how everyone was related. I do not know if it was the writing or my attention span, but it took a visual forest of family trees for me to keep everyone straight. Why did she have to throw in something so complicated? It did do some explaining and answered a nagging question that had popped up, but still, when your mind has been slowly meandering through a simple story, to throw in a “thinking” part was surprising to say the least.

This book definitely fits into the vacation read category. No heavy thinking throughout the book only to be grabbed with an ending that has the reader wondering “how did we get here, did she just make it at the end”. If you are leading a reader down a particular path, leave some breadcrumbs from time to time so the ending makes more sense.

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