big sky

3.5 stars
An ok, uneven mystery/thriller.

This is book 5 in the Brodie Jackson mystery series. I haven’t read any of the previous books, but there is enough background in the book for me to understand the characters and follow the plot. The mystery itself is a stand alone story.

Jackson Brodie now resides in a quiet seaside village. His current job as a private investigator has him following an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife. Brodie’s chance encounter with a troubled man on a cliff leads to a bigger, uglier mystery plaguing the area. His curiosity lands him in the middle of a concurrent investigation regarding a ring of older men that hired young girls for sex.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Overall the book was ok, but it felt disjointed to me. Parts of the book were good, others seemed to ramble on with no purpose. There was a lot of re-hashing of previous plot lines, and while helpful to me since I hadn’t read any of the previous books, was still more than necessary and would have annoyed me if I had read the previous books.

The plot line with the two female detectives annoyed me. Most of it seemed random and pointless until the end of the book. For all of the author’s background given in the book, there was absolutely no background as to why the two detectives had been put together or what they were supposed to be investigating. The author wrote them as borderline incompetent, uninterested in their work and unambitious. I didn’t get it, and it irritated me. There was no explanation as to why the other police officers were so hostile to the women, or why they were summarily dismissed by their co-workers and supervisors.

This was one of those books that I just couldn’t wait to end. The story moved along at an uneven pace and the characters made choices that didn’t make sense to me. From reading other people’s reviews, they seemed to really enjoy the book. It just wasn’t for me.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.