Something in the Water

One of these days I'm going to finish a book I actually, honestly like. Today is not that day.

I had hopes. That first paragraph? That first chapter? Wow. Fantastic. From there though? The timeline rolled back 3 months and it was all downhill. My curiosity while initially piqued, turned into boredom, scoffing and page counting. At first I thought Erin could be (and should have been) an empathetic character. She has a good job. She's engaged, planning wedding to the man she loved. A man who looses his job (which always seemed sketchy, but the author never does anything more than skim over that). And then something goes so horribly wrong that she's googling how to dig a grave. The problem is that somewhere between her crying about only getting a 2 week honeymoon in Bora Bora instead of 3 and her drunkenly opening a bag she had already decided they shouldn't be opening (twice), my brain went “OMG. She's dumber than a box of hair.” So yeah, there went any semblance of empathy.

Yet the hope from the beginning persisted. It had to get better. Right? Yeah. No. Instead the reader was treated to overly detailed EVERYTHING. Don't bother opening Google, just pick up your copy of Something In the Water the next time you want to know anything - and I mean anything - about a Glock. Or selling diamonds. Or how to choose the menu for your wedding reception. None of that mattered all that much in the end. Heck - there are characters - Caro, Alexis - that I still don't know why they're even present. The twist as predictable as it was might have worked if the author had spent a little time making Mark into something other than a 2 dimensional cardboard cut out. Instead if felt rushed and incoherent as the author spent pages explaining (imagine that. More explaining) everything that actually happened and was perpetrated by the real bad guys in order to hand wave all the plot holes.

This one could have been great. Instead I'm left with knowing that 36 cubic feet of soil weighs roughly the same as your average hippopotamus.