Monday, January 5, 2015

Winter at the Door

Title: Winter at the Door
Author: Sarah Graves
Publication: January 6th 2015 by Bantam
Format: eBook ARC; Hardcover, 272 pages
Genre: Mystery
Source: My thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an opportunity to read an advance copy of this book.
Series: Lizzie Snow #1

I am still not sure about this book. It was sort of “murder lite” with a few psychological aspects.

This is a new series from Sarah Graves that broke a character out of her ongoing Home Repair Is Homicide mysteries and moved her to a new job near the Canadian border. The Home Repair series is not one that I was familiar with and did not have a full understand of Lizzie Snow. Ms. Graves did a good job with some of the background, but I think that I would have liked to know more about how her sister died and how her niece went missing.

Officer Lizzie Snow has given up a job in Boston that she loved to come to Bearkill, Maine to follow up on a lead from her ex-lover, police detective Dylan Hudson. Dylan was given information that Lizzie’s niece Nikki was seen in the area. It was not only for the tip, but also because Bearkill was looking for a detective. Apparently, retired police officers in the area are turning up dead and the current police chief has a feeling that four deaths are too much of a coincidence.

Sheriff Cody Chevrier of the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department may have bent the truth a little bit, but now that Lizzie is here, there appears to be more going on and some of it is happening right in her own office.

There is a secondary investigation going on with murdered girls in Bangor, Maine that is keeping Dylan too close for Lizzie’s comfort but then again there is a very interesting veterinarian in the area that just might keep her mind off past mistake.

Points need to be connected and the reader is drawn to many different aspects at the same time -which is refreshing. Quite often, authors become myopic and the reader grows bored with the same storyline being rehashed. I am hoping that Ms. Grave’s was just drawing the bigger picture with this book and future installments will be bound tighter and more intensity will be brought to the characters.

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