Lay Your Body Down

This had a promising start! Delilah “Del” Walker is a 20-something living in the Twin Cities. Her life is a mess: she's just quit yet another dead-end retail job, her rude med student boyfriend has dumped her, and her roommate is getting ready to move out. Then she finds out on Facebook that her first boyfriend, Lars, who had broken her heart in college by cheating on her, has died in a hunting accident. He'd just contacted her for the first time in years about a week beforehand, leaving a cryptic voicemail. She wants to go to the funeral, but that means going back home to the small town she grew up in, where everyone she knows is a member the conservative, culty church she quit after that college breakup...including Lars's widow/the girl he cheated on her with, Del's former friend Eve, who has become a popular blogger espousing the submissive “Noble Wife” philosophy propagated by the church's leader. At the funeral, Lars's parents beseech Del to look further into the explanation for his death, since she has connections they don't as church outsiders. After seeing Eve in a suspicious circumstance with one of the church's pastors, she agrees. Sounds interesting, right? Small-town secrets, a cult angle, a maybe-murder mystery? But it goes pretty quickly downhill from there. Del's “investigation” makes the Scooby gang look like sophisticated sleuths, the prose is amateurish and relies on the characters delivering huge chunks of exposition through dialogue completely unrelated to the way people actually talk to each other, the obligatory romantic interest is a plot device rather than a real person, and the end...did not land, at least for me. Would not recommend this even as a beach read.