In the Cradle Lies

After giving the first book in the series a 2.5 rating, while friends loved it, I decided to give the series another try. Alas. This one was worse.

1/5 plot: A skier wants to ski down a slope that has been abandoned for 86 years. The MCs would prefer to interest him in discovery of his genealogy instead, but they especially wish to prevent him from skiing the old slope.
1/5 characters: So inconsistent and mostly interested in controlling each other's destinies.
1/5 dialogue: Putting facts the characters should all know in conversation results in awkward conversation; some people erroneously believe that means they are showing instead of telling, but in reality they are telling another character instead of the reader and ending with conversations that would probably never happen in real life.
1/5 historical accuracy: Don't insert details that sound fancy if you haven't researched how they actually work, at least on Google.

Plot: I was shocked that anyone would think a ski slope would be viable after 86 years. The city is located just west of Boulder, Colorado, and the elevation is around 8,000 above sea level (number given when the fiancée shows up)...even if the slope is 2,000 feet above town, he's facing a mature forest of aspen and blue spruce. The tundra line in the Colorado Rockies is above 13,000 feet. There would be no slope to ski. Based on the information given, nature has reclaimed the land long since.Characters: They are all up in each other's business and really bugged me. But for all the being in each other's business, when a stranger comes to town and starts throwing around hard cash, they don't seem to have heard of the stranger-danger term, not even when the man begins to show evidence of insanity when deciding his life is incomplete until he's skied a long-defunct trail. The women instantly think romance and accept his lavish gifts with very little demur. Tucker himself disgusted me, from crazed sugar-daddy to the moment when his fiancée shows up and reclaims him. Lots of folks find out they are adopted, or of an adopted family...I never got sold on why finding out a family secret of someone he wasn't even related to would make him suicidal.Dialogue/narrative: From the 1934 narrative when the small boy is using fifty-dollar words at the age of four in his personal narrative and reasoning out complex ethical questions at age seven, but regresses to normal conversation by age 14, all the way up to where the modern father and daughter have to have a conversation about what a topographical map is and treat it as a great anomaly in the world (they have one copy and are quite careful of it...seriously, those are available at any bookstore...I wouldn't go to Colorado without one if I meant to leave the interstate...)Historical accuracy: “The age of the Ryder home meant any efforts to heat it efficiently were unsuccessful...delivery of the oil he hoped would see them through the winter if they were sparing with the radiators...” Don't add these details if you didn't Google something, even if you have no clue how historical homes are heated. Radiators are not run on oil; they run on steam with heated water. Steam heat is so efficient that many old homes are able to stay comfortable in the winter at levels of energy that qualify for today's modern energy star ratings, and some modern homes are actually installing new versions of radiators for energy efficiency. The key, if you have a working steam heat system, is to block drafts (insulate) and to keep your radiators cleaned and sized correctly to the rooms. If he's got plenty of ill-gotten gains, there is no reason his home can't be warm. Further, holes were left when the radiators were installed, and Matthew overhears conversations through the holes. But in one scene he watches through the hole to see what happens below...well, if he had a small enough head to put an eye to a hole beneath a radiator that probably weighs at least 300 pounds (they are made of cast iron), then it's still going to be the edge of the room and he would only be able to see what's directly below...so the folks in the room would need to be sitting against that lower wall for him to see anything, even if he could access that spot with an eyeball. Also if they only use their steam heat a little, the lines are going to freeze and break and there won't be any more steam heat...the boiler is what prevents the lines from freezing.Also, a woman recalls her baby's birth accurately after her child is stolen from her bedside in a hospital in the 1930s. This was the era when women experienced “painless childbirth” via twilight sleep. This combo of morphine and scopolamine was used in a vast majority of hospital births from 1914 until the expose in 1958...there is no way she would recall that experience lucidly if she was under it, and I can't conceive of a baby-snatcher being stupid enough to take a baby from an alert woman even if she had some reason to refuse “twilight sleep” since it was touted as being without side effects until the 1958 expose.Now for a fun pet peeve: the weather! Five inches of “almost a blizzard” in Colorado creates panic among the townspeople and shuts down the whole town. Somehow this storm also knocks out windows and freezes pipes in town. A major pipe leak shuts down a town business in the middle of the storm. 1) if it's a regular leak with a pipe coming undone, turn it off at the main junction and you just function without water 2) if you are going to blame it on the storm, hate to break it to you, but if the pipe breaks because it froze, then there is no flood until it thaws. Not during a winter storm. If the power goes out during a winter storm, don't panic over your ice cream melting: just sit it outside in a snow bank... Then they say the street is slicking over and it's becoming “an ice storm”....uh, you don't get ice during snow blizzards unless the street has experienced melt and then refrozen...this isn't a side effect of five inches of snow until the sun has come out. And when did I miss that the snow changed to rain and created that ice? Because the only thing mentioned as falling out of the sky is more snow.

So, yeah, there was more in this that didn't make sense than what did. I won't be continuing the series. *Edit: I forgot I already downloaded the next from NetGalley, so I don't know if I will ever read it or not. Probably not.

Thanks to the publisher for a free reading copy. A favorable review was not required.