Friday, July 7, 2017

Down A Dark Road

Title: Down a Dark Road
Author: Linda Castillo
Expected Publication: July 11th 2017 by Minotaur Books
Format: eBook, Hardcover, 320 pages
Genre: Police Procedural / Suspense
Source: My thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for an opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.
Series: Kate Burkholder #9

This book was a disappointment. If it were not for the previous eight books that I could not put down, I would have given up early on. It was not until three quarters of the way through that things got interesting. Usually there are multiple plotlines in a Castillo book, but other than a brief mention of a call to graffiti on a bridge, ‘Down a Dark Road’ concentrated on a single straight line to a mediocre end.

Kate Burkholder knew that one day she would get a call that would hit too close to home. She grew up Amish and now she is the police chief of Painters Mill, the same area where she played in the creek and picked berries as a child. Now she must separate her childhood memories of Joseph King, the boy next door with the man that broke out of prison where he was serving a life sentence for killing his wife.

Kate becomes his unwilling hostage yet that is not how she is viewed. There is too much history and with a photo that could have multiple meanings, Kate is not only frantically searching for the truth, but she is also trying desperately to keep her job.

The story boils down to secrets and what a precocious 3-year-old saw. Kate will not give up, she made a promise to Sadie before she realized how deep this murder investigation went and who, in the surrounding areas of Ohio, are responsible for a cover-up.

For me, this book would have been much better if they had cut out most of the first third of this book and continued where it had ended. There would have been more “meat” to the story if she had continued with the conspiracy and brought the real criminal to justice.

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