2008: #54.5 – A Cold Dark Place (Gregg Olsen)

This unfinished book was A Cold Dark Place by Gregg Olsen.  The back of the book reads:

The Seeds Of Evil…

In a secluded farm house in the Pacific Northwest, a family has been slaughtered–and a teenage son has disappeared. Single mother and cop, Emily Kenyon spearheads a dark hunt for a killer. But Emily’s teenage daughter Jenna is one step ahead of her…

Are Planted In…

Jenna knows the boy suspected of murdering his family and wants to help him–perhaps too much. Then within days of the first murder, another family is butchered, this time in Iowa. And on the heels of this brutal slaying, another follows in Salt Lake City. Eerie similarities link the crime scenes. But an even darker connection threatens to claim even more victims…

A Cold Dark Place

As Emily fits the puzzle pieces together, she realizes the danger surrounding her daughter is worse than she’d imagined. Now in a desperate race to save Jenna, Emily must match wits with the most cunning, diabolical killer she’s faced yet in her career–a killer who’s just placed her and her daughter at the top of his list…

I picked up this book because it was a June book-of-the-month in the Novel Ladies book group. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed in this and only made it about halfway through before I got completely bored. I was expecting so much more. Nothing here grabbed me. I didn’t care about Emily, except to think that she jumped to conclusions a little too quickly to be a good detective. I didn’t care about her daughter. I didn’t care about Nick and whether or not he killed his family. I especially didn’t care about the guy who may or may not have been a serial killer, and I didn’t read enough to find out how the heck his story was connected to the rest of it. I found the writing to be uninspired, and the “timestamps” more distracting than helpful. I know this is only Olsen’s second fiction book, but someone with 10 books under his belt should be able to figure out another way to tell me it’s 3 hours later in the day. There was just no suspense here for me. I’m curious to find out what the other Ladies thought of it!