“Thinking back to his own childhood, perhaps that wasn’t so odd. As much as your thoughts and feelings towards the world could be shaped by your peers, more often than not it was your family who nurtured your world view."

When teenage Holly Bettany is found dead after a night-time beach party, detective Tom Janssen is tasked with finding out who was behind this crime which snuffed out the life of this promising young girl. Aided by detective Tamara, the ambitious and outspoken woman in charge of the case, we delve into the dark secrets hiding in the town of Norfolk.

I am quite sad to say that this book actually threw me into a reading slump, because despite having an interesting premise, its flaws outweighed the good potential it had. This book felt like an amateur first draft, and the writing was too weak, almost felt too mechanical and monotonous. We do know that detective/crime stories are meant to get our brains working, and there should definitely be some form of analytical component to the story when it belongs to this genre, but the entire writing style lacked life. The characters felt too one-dimensional and flat, all of them giving off the similar impression of "looking polished on the outside while having deep dark secrets tucked within", but they all read the same to me, with nothing truly distinguishing them from one another. They lacked soul and realism, and it felt like this story wasn't even a fully fleshed out one, but an idea created by the author, not pumped with the necessary life a story needs to feel real. The author seems to do a lot of telling instead of showing, and due to this lack of life, it was hard for me to feel angry or sad or happy for anyone.

In short, this book was just a collection of endless rambling that ended with a sudden chain of convenient events that led us to the eventual murderer. Even that section of the book felt overdone and even comical, with the entire weather shifting from a clear sunny day into a stormy and foggy mess just when the final conflict is taking place, only for it to immediately revert back to being sunny once it was all over.

We don't even get closure on the rest of the hanging story lines, including very severe situations including sexual assault and various cover-ups for horrible deeds. Everything seems to be left hanging in the air once the main culprit of Holly's murder is discovered, and even that was poorly executed, since we don't even get to see the culprit actually speak or say anything, taking away their perspective, not fully being able to delve into their motives from a subjective lens, and instead, we are just mechanically told what they were through the thought processes of the detectives. If I'm reading a crime story, I want to deep-dive into the murderer's thoughts and intentions, so this definitely wasn't enough for me.

I would have also liked to feel more sorry for Holly, because what happened to her was tragic, but her single point of view was so blandly written, and the rest of the book did a lousy job making Holly feel like a human being and instead, it made her an idea people are trying to solve a puzzle around, so I found myself struggling to feel any emotional impact.

Like I said earlier, this book which was supposed to take me not more than 3 days to read, ended up dragging on for around 9 days, because I just didn't feel like reading it. This is a 1.75 star book for me but I'm rounding it up to 2 because the potential was great, and the actual idea is very gripping, but the execution was terrible in my opinion. I don't know if I can bring myself to read the remaining works in this series, but this just wasn't the book for me.