All the Little Raindrops by Mia Sheridan

E-Reader Addict Rating: 🌟🌟🌟

I’m not sure how I feel about Mia Sheridan’s turn towards dark suspense stories. I fell in love with her storytelling with Archer’s Voice, but this one is SO FAR away from that.

All the Little Raindrops starts with two high school students discovering they’ve been kidnapped and locked in separate cages. The first 35% of the book is their horrifying time as prisoners and their harrowing escape. (I want to make readers aware that while what happens to the hero and heroine isn’t described in graphic detail, you’re given enough to know what they experienced during their time in captivity). Then we get a couple quick chapters of post-escape and one year later. The final 60% takes place seven years later, when the hero – who has become a personal investigator – learns that what happened to him and the heroine may still be happening and he reaches out to the heroine for help with his investigation into who was responsible for their abduction and why. From there, such a convoluted and complicated plot unraveled that it made we wonder what the author is eating/drinking/smoking to have her come up with such a disturbing story.

But I have to admit, even though dark stories aren’t my usual jam, I am willing to read them if Mia Sheridan is the author. Especially if there’s a romance storyline and one of my favorite tropes (not sharing what that is so I don’t spoil anything). However, I feel like this book could have used a little more romance to balance out all the rest of the book’s icky parts (as she did in Where the Blame Lies).

I’m not sure if I’m going to keep reading Ms. Sheridan’s thrillers/suspense novels. I have to get in the right frame of mind and real life is enough of a dumpster fire. I seldom open my Kindle with the desire to read something sinister and unsettling – even if I have confidence the author will deliver writing that is fantastic and engaging. Reading is how I unwind after a long day, how I relax, how I empty my mind so I can fall asleep quickly at night. Books like this don’t help with that!

*thank you to NetGalley and Montlake for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review

All Rhodes Lead Here by Mariana Zapata

E-Reader Addict Rating: 🌟🌟

I am not a person who stays away from – or is afraid of – long books. But good golly Miss Molly this one was WAY TOO LONG.

I also must not be a very patient reader because the start of this book made me cranky. There’s nothing that turns me off a book faster than when the author alludes to some big, terrible event in a character’s past and draaaagggggsssss out the reveal forever. Which is exactly what we get here, times two. We know something went horribly wrong early in the heroine’s life, but we don’t know what. We know something more recently went wrong with her life. We know something went wrong with her long-time relationship. We don’t know what her career was. We just don’t know much. Just that she’s running from her old life and thinks going to a place she once lived while she was growing up is a good place to start figuring out the rest of her life. And because the whole book is told from Aurora’s point of view, there’s even more unanswered questions about everyone in her new life until she screws up the courage to ask.

And it just goes on and on and on. With so many words describing so many inane, repetitive details. The humor felt contrived, and the requisite third-act conflict an unnecessary, overreacted result of noncommunication. My overwhelming feeling reading this book was frustration instead of pleasure.

The only good part about the book was Amos, the hero’s teenage son. And finally finishing it (which took me two weeks).

I think this author’s slow-burn, glacially slow paced, extra long books may be better suited to my audiobook tastes. But then again, I didn’t much enjoy being in this heroine’s head. So maybe it wouldn’t have helped here. All I know is I’m not inclined to read the author again if it’s going to take me two weeks to finish her book…

* thank you to NetGalley and Avon and Harper Voyager for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review