I sort of enjoyed this page turning mystery/thriller/romance for the first hundred pages or so. It’s an easy vacay read and it pulled me in with its “the farmer is dead” opening line. But after awhile, I got tired of the writing, especially in the second half which becomes telly and explanatory. Events and motives should speak for themselves, but in this book, the author tells us repeatedly what is obvious about a character’s guilt, shame, love, regret, etc. 

And then we get a Jodi Piccoult-like plot twist near the end. Problematic for me not due to believability but due to what I call the Piccoult pattern. It happens in all of her books, and this author, Clare Leslie Hall, seems to have copied that trope of “throw in one more crazy complication to shock the reader” just as the story winds down. 

This is a small town girl falls in love with rich, sophisticated boy story that gets complicated with small town farmer boy also loving her. So we have a love triangle, a mystery about who killed whom, and a social tier mismatch. Some of this is interesting and real and has potential for a well told story, but it too often feels cheesy and melodramatic. Fine for a quick vacation read, but not much literary merit. Especially after Ian McEwen’s What we Can Know, which offers subtlety and depth and beautiful sentences to develop characters (including a love triangle) in a more compelling and convincing way. 

I’m concurrently reading a long and dense history of NZ book, so in that sense, this book made for a good break from note taking.