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A review by maggers94
Abandoned in Death by J.D. Robb
1.0
This took me forever to finish. I just couldn’t get into it, mainly because of the writing style. I didn’t realize it was a series and hadn’t read anything else that came before it. You can’t pick this up and be immediately immersed in the world without the other books the way you can with other series. It’s heavy on dialogue and very light on description of characters and their relationship to the main character. It felt like a constant rotation of names with very surface level background information. Even if I had started from book one, I don’t know if I would have been into this series. It reads like a script for a TV crime procedural because it’s so dialogue heavy. I love a crime show, but in a book form this was lacking in the world building I’d need to feel immersed and invested.
The way the twist came out also felt thrown together. All of a sudden they just instantly know who it is in the middle of a conversation where the witness gave no identifying info. I found myself turning back the pages to figure out how they came to that conclusion because the whole “he gave us a false clue” thing really felt like a haphazard explanation. As a reader, I always felt like I was having a hard time following the detective’s thinking. Every so often she’d have a “it must be this moment” that had a very lackluster “because of” to follow that the previous parts of the story doesn’t really set up well.
In general I’m pretty surprised the reviews are so high. Maybe reading more of the series would make me feel differently, but I doubt it. A book should be able to stand on its own enough to make me want to go back and read more if I pick it up not knowing it’s a series. Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series is a good example of that. I’d unknowingly started with book 13 and went back and started from book 1 because I loved it so much.
The character building was just so lackluster here that it didn’t make me want to go back to older books to read more. I just felt so completely disconnected from the characters and world that it made me acutely aware that I was reading instead of getting lost in the story. Overall, one of my least favorite reads this year.
The way the twist came out also felt thrown together. All of a sudden they just instantly know who it is in the middle of a conversation where the witness gave no identifying info. I found myself turning back the pages to figure out how they came to that conclusion because the whole “he gave us a false clue” thing really felt like a haphazard explanation. As a reader, I always felt like I was having a hard time following the detective’s thinking. Every so often she’d have a “it must be this moment” that had a very lackluster “because of” to follow that the previous parts of the story doesn’t really set up well.
In general I’m pretty surprised the reviews are so high. Maybe reading more of the series would make me feel differently, but I doubt it. A book should be able to stand on its own enough to make me want to go back and read more if I pick it up not knowing it’s a series. Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series is a good example of that. I’d unknowingly started with book 13 and went back and started from book 1 because I loved it so much.
The character building was just so lackluster here that it didn’t make me want to go back to older books to read more. I just felt so completely disconnected from the characters and world that it made me acutely aware that I was reading instead of getting lost in the story. Overall, one of my least favorite reads this year.