I will admit that I found the first book much more compelling. In The Dead Season, it was easy to forget that there was a child who'd been kidnapped, that those were the immediate stakes - instead there's so much focus on the cold case that the threat almost doesn't feel real.

I will say that I really like how Shana's PTSD was handled. She's both aggressively trying to combat it (by taking crazy personal risks, taking self defense classes, and attending counseling) but she's also, not controlled by it, but certainly very affected by it. Her paranoia adds a lot to the rather, dare I say, bland and unthreatening scenes.

I think part of my lack of enthusiasm stems from my own ambivalence to family drama. Death in the Family had the tension of a classic locked room mystery where pretty much anyone could be the killer. But The Dead Season was so spread out geographically and we got the real clues in such tiny bites that I had a hard time bringing myself to guess along. Plus, I hate when a big conflict in the plot is "I can't tell [trusted person] this important info because it would make me look bad" - and since that secret-sharing was the catalyst for a rapid increase in the pacing, I could have used it much earlier in the book.

This makes it sound like I didn't remotely enjoy the book, but that's not true. Wegert's writing is compulsively readable and I was able to devour the book in two halves (plus a little bit leftover) and I definitely plan on revisiting the series when the next installment comes out.

{Thank you Berkley Pub and NetGalley for the advanced copy; all thoughts are my own}